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Peer review can be a confusing process at times, so to help cut out all the jargon and make it as simple as possible, we have developed the ‘Peer Review Experts’ blog series. We’ll be bringing you top tips on a wide range of peer review subjects, straight from the experts; our very own peer-review team at F1000Research. This week, Jeniffer Jeyakumar, Peer Review Coordinator at F1000Research, explains how the peer review process works for each new update of a Living Systematic Review.

Last year, we published the first Living Systematic Review article on F1000Research. A Living Systematic Review is similar to a Systematic Review, however, one of the main differences is when new evidence becomes available, the article will be updated to include these latest findings. This new evidence is found by continually looking at the most recently published literature on the research topic. The F1000Research publishing model is uniquely suited to this style of publishing, as the versioning system allows repeated updates of an article whilst preserving a record of all changes made for interested readers.

Ever evolving

Because of their dynamic nature, the peer review for these articles occurs slightly differently to other article types that we publish. We realise that our reviewers might not be familiar with this style of article, so we’ve included a specific paragraph to our review invitation emails to explain what a living systematic review is and how the peer review of this article type is structured.

Additionally, reviewers should specifically look at whether the authors have everything needed for a Living Systematic Review, so we’ve included two new questions to the report form. These are: ‘Is the Living method justified?’ and ‘Have the search and update schedule been clearly defined and justified?’.  These questions help ensure that the Living Systematic Review is both valid and reported correctly.

Next round

Once a new update of a Living Systematic Review has been published and if, for example, new studies are found which change the previous findings, another round of peer review will occur. The original reviewers who reviewed the previous version will be invited to review again to evaluate the new findings that have been included. We will aim for the same reviewers providing reviews across versions, however, we understand that they may not be available, especially given the potential number of versions.

In the case that the original reviewers can’t provide further reviews, we will of course invite other reviewers to review where necessary. The peer review reports will be published as we would any other peer review report for a new version of an article. We believe that transparent peer review is the way forward, and so with all our reviews the reviewer’s name and affiliation will be published alongside their peer review report.

A good example of a Living Systematic Review is Counotte et al’s article, where the authors aim to refine our understanding of the epidemiology of the Zika virus. The authors have included an interactive figure where you can change the variables to show the data you are most interested in. If you would like to read more about why the authors chose this article type or a Q+A with the authors; please visit the following blogs: https://blog.f1000.com/2019/12/13/living-systematic-reviews-for-regular-updates/ and https://blog.f1000.com/2019/12/11/keeping-up-with-the-evidence-on-zika-virus/.