Next review date policy

 

The Veterinary Evidence (VE) journal strives to provide the veterinary community with up-to-date evidence-based content. However, new evidence is continually being published and so ensuring that the journal’s content remains up-to-date poses a challenge.

At the top of every published Knowledge Summary is a ‘next review date’ which is two years from when the literature search took place. This date highlights to readers the age of the search and that new evidence may be available since publication.

VE endeavours to update published content, however, it would be an unfeasible and ever-increasing task to continually update all Knowledge Summaries once the search strategy hits two years. Instead, VE selects papers to update based on their uptake (downloads/views) across three categories: small animal, production and equine.

The process is twofold:

A

  1. VE will run an annual report by year to see all content views.
  2. VE will choose to proactively update the top five papers/updates under small animal, production and equine that are both highly read and where the search strategy is two or more years old.

E.g In 2019 we will run a report to look at 2018 content views. Papers which were highly viewed within 2018 and where the search strategy is two or more years old will be selected.

  1. VE will proactively update these 15 papers.

B

  1. All of the other papers where the search strategy is two years old will be added to an online list categorised by species.
  2. The papers on this list will be available to update by the veterinary community and not necessarily by the original author.

Knowledge Summary updates are new publications. Updates can be made to papers published in VE by new authors as all content is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence. This license allows others to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, so long as the original paper is credited appropriately.

The process

  • The library team searches the literature.
  • If no new papers are found then an updated search date and ‘next review date’ are added to the paper.
  • If new papers are found then the original author is asked whether or not the new paper(s) meets the inclusion criteria to be critically appraised.
  • If one or more papers are critically appraised then the KS will be updated.
  • If the new papers are not aligned to the PICO and will not be critically appraised then an updated Search outcome table, search date and ‘next review date’ is added to the paper.
  • If the original author does not want to update the paper then we will proactively find an author as well as move it to the online list.
  • Once the update is published the original paper will state ‘This is not the most recent version of this KS’ and it will link to the update.

 

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