Share the Knowledge, Health Researchers Say

Medical researchers from Ottawa and Britain want all their colleagues to tell the world what studies they’re working on. Sometimes the left lab doesn’t know what the right lab is doing. The call to announce new studies publicly applies to “systematic reviews,” which are wide-ranging summaries of all the existing research on a given health topic.

Doctors and scientists need these reviews. They sum up anything from all the studies of a new drug to all the work analysing how to deal with hospital crowding or how to vaccinate in a flu pandemic. The trouble is that sometimes these reviews are done over and over, needlessly, because too many research teams don’t know about the work of others.

That wastes time, talent and money. For example, David Moher of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and the University of Ottawa is part of a group studying how to improve diabetic care in Canada.

They went looking for systematic reviews on the topic, and found 13, all summarizing the same issue.
“That’s a waste of money. Maybe one, two or three, but do you need 13?” Moher said. “And so there’s no place in the world where you can go and see who’s doing what in the world and what’s going on. And that’s an issue because the latest estimate is that 11 systematic reviews are being published every day” in medical journals.