Still moving toward automation of the systematic review process: a summary of discussions at the third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR)

Annette M. O’ConnorEmail author View ORCID ID profile,
Guy Tsafnat,
Stephen B. Gilbert,
Kristina A. Thayer,
Ian Shemilt,
James Thomas,
Paul Glasziou and
Mary S. Wolfe

Systematic Reviews20198:57

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-019-0975-y

Received: 30 May 2018
Accepted: 12 February 2019
Published: 20 February 2019

Open Peer Review reports

Abstract

The third meeting of the International Collaboration for Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR) was held 17–18 October 2017 in London, England. ICASR is an interdisciplinary group whose goal is to maximize the use of technology for conducting rapid, accurate, and efficient systematic reviews of scientific evidence. The group seeks to facilitate the development and widespread acceptance of automated techniques for systematic reviews. The meeting’s conclusion was that the most pressing needs at present are to develop approaches for validating currently available tools and to provide increased access to curated corpora that can be used for validation. To that end, ICASR’s short-term goals in 2018–2019 are to propose and publish protocols for key tasks in systematic reviews and to develop an approach for sharing curated corpora for validating the automation of the key tasks.