Systematic Review Authors Editing and Proofreading Services

A reviewer asks why nineteen studies became eleven. The answer exists — six were excluded for population, two for design, and one was a duplicate publication of another — but the protocol said studies would be excluded if they were not relevant, and the flow diagram gives a total without the reasons. What was a defensible set of decisions now looks like a set of choices made after the results were visible.

We edit what systematic reviewers and evidence synthesists produce — review protocols and their eligibility criteria, search strategies and their documentation, screening and selection procedures, flow diagrams and their accompanying accounting, data extraction and quality assessment documentation, risk of bias assessments and their narrative, synthesis and meta-analysis reporting, heterogeneity and sensitivity analysis narratives, certainty of evidence assessments, and rapid, scoping and living review documentation. Our editors work on the accounting between the search and the synthesis.

The eligibility criteria and the flow accounting are what make a systematic review systematic, and their failure is criteria that require judgement and a diagram that reports only totals. A review is a set of pre-specified decisions, and any decision that was not pre-specified has to be declared as post hoc. We work through these so each criterion is stated as a test a second screener can apply identically — the population with its boundaries, the intervention with its minimum dose or duration, the comparator, the outcome and how it must have been measured, the design and the language and date limits — since "relevant studies" is the criterion that produces disagreement at every stage; so the exclusion reasons are pre-specified as a hierarchy, because a study failing on two criteria must be counted once and consistently; so the flow accounting gives numbers with reasons at every stage rather than totals, and the reasons at full-text exclusion are itemised, given that this is the stage reviewers scrutinise; so any criterion added or changed after the protocol is declared with the date and the reason, as an undeclared change is the single most damaging thing in a review; so duplicate and companion publications are handled by a stated rule rather than case by case; so the studies that were nearly included are listed, since their absence is what a specialist reader notices; and so the disagreement rate between screeners is reported. Reviews documented this way survive scrutiny.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including protocols, extraction data and unpublished reviews. We are editors rather than methodologists or information specialists, and we offer no view on eligibility, synthesis or certainty of evidence. What we can do is make every number in the flow diagram accounted for.