Establishing a new journal for systematic review products

Welcome to Systematic Reviews. You may be already familiar with systematic reviews, or be curious and have accessed our journal to learn more about them.A systematic review is a review "of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select, and critically appraise relevant research, and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. Statistical methods (meta-analysis) may or may not be used to analyze and summarize the results of the included studies." [1].There are several reasons underlying the need for systematic reviews. Given the vast amount of information published in the biomedical literature, it is almost impossible to keep up to date by reading reports of individual studies - the trajectory of research publications is variable and very frequent in specific healthcare areas. But, individual studies are seldom sufficient to drive change. They are often too small to reach reliable conclusions, and for fair evaluation, it is important to look at the totality (or at least an unbiased sample of the totality) of evidence in favour of, against, or neutral to the healthcare intervention under consideration. Systematic reviews provide a means of doing this in an objective, transparent and reproducible way. With a well developed question, sound methods, the results of systematic reviews provide strong evidence for rational decision making.Systematic reviews emerged in healthcare in the 1980s after initial development in the fields of psychology and education [2]. The 1990s saw many important developments, including the establishment of the Cochrane Collaboration, a network of about 28,000 professionals dedicated to synthesizing the effectiveness of interventions across all of healthcare. Systematic reviews became firmly embedded in UK health decision making [3] and the Evidence-based Practice Centre (EPC) program, a network of 14 centres throughout North America, was also established during the 19