Principles for good scholarship in systematic reviews

Many sources document problems that jeopardize the trustworthiness of systematic reviews. This is a major concern given their potential to influence patient care and impact people's lives. Responsibility for producing trustworthy conclusions on the evidence in systematic reviews is borne primarily by authors who need the necessary training and resources to correctly report on the current knowledge base. Peer reviewers and editors are also accountable; they must ensure that systematic reviews are accurate by demonstrating proper methods. To support all these stakeholders, we attempt to distill the sprawling guidance that is currently available in our recent co‐publication about best tools and practices for systematic reviews. We specifically address how to meet methodological conduct standards applicable to key components of systematic reviews. In this complementary invited review, we place these standards in the context of good scholarship principles for systematic review development. Our intention is to reach a broad audience and potentially improve the trustworthiness of evidence syntheses published in the developmental medicine literature and beyond. Based on our co‐publication, ‘Guidance to best practices for systematic reviews’, this invited review focusses on well‐documented deficiencies of systematic reviews and briefly explains some of the reasoning behind current standards. These deficiencies are categorized by six principles of good scholarship. The visual highlights these and serves as a timeline for the major tasks in developing a review. We refer interested readers to our Guidance article for details and references to source documents.