Ultra Rapid Reviews

Traditional evidence synthesis methods, particularly systematic reviews can take up to 1-2 years to be completed. This often fails to meet the time-sensitive needs of policymakers and healthcare professionals. Rapid reviews (RRs) have emerged as a pragmatic alternative, accelerating evidence synthesis production significantly by abbreviating methodological steps. However, also RRs can take a few months to synthesize the evidence, which can be too long for very urgent situations. There are situations that require evidence-informed answers within a few hours or days. Such a short timeline requires a special methodological approach that achieves an acceptable balance of rigor and speed. Such RRs can be called ultra-RRs. This project aims to determine decision-makers’ requirements for ultra-rapid reviews and identify and evaluate the most valid and efficient approaches for producing ultra-rapid reviews.