# Surgical systematic reviews: best available evidence or disposable waste?

## TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of high-quality surgical systematic reviews and proposes innovative approaches to ensure they provide new insights.

## Contribution

The paper introduces living systematic reviews and evidence mapping as solutions to prevent redundant surgical systematic reviews.

## Key findings

- High-quality systematic reviews are essential for evidence-based surgical decision-making.
- Living systematic reviews and evidence mapping can help maintain up-to-date and relevant surgical evidence.
- SRs should only be conducted if they offer new clinically relevant insights.

## Abstract

Evidence-based medicine demands treatment options for patients to be based on the current best available evidence. Systematic reviews (SRs) with meta-analyses allow surgeons to make therapeutical decisions in accordance with the highest level of evidence. Also, high-quality SRs support physicians to challenge the colossal amount of new research data created daily. The systematic review working group of the Study Center of the German Society of Surgery (SDGC) has created specific methodological literature regarding surgical SRs, giving recommendations to assess critical risk of bias and to prevent the creation of SRs that do not provide any new insights to the field. SRs should only be considered if there is new clinically relevant data available that allows the SR to create novel evidence. To address the dilemma of new SRs generated without adding new evidence, living systematic reviews and evidence mapping represent an innovative approach, in which SRs are regularly updated with new research data.