Implementation of systematic reviews in EFSA scientific outputs workflow
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Systematic reviews (SR) are an evidence synthesis approach that provides robust and transparent answers to clearly formulated questions. Originally developed for use in clinical practice, SRs have wider applicability, including food and feed safety risk assessment. EFSA has implemented the use of SRs, and this document contributes to the further development of this in-house capacity. Since the publication of the document “Application of Systematic Review Methodology to Food and Feed Safety Assessments to Support Decision Making”, which mainly focuses on interventions and exposures (PECO/PICO), little has changed in this arena. Fast increasing fields of application include chemical and environmental risk assessment, and analysing environmental management interventions. Considering time constraints at EFSA, the use of SRs should be pursued thoughtfully. Important are the use of explicit systematic methods aimed at minimising bias and maximising transparency in order to produce the most reliable findings that can be used to inform decision making. Participants of the training courses indicated SRs should be a priority for controversial topics (which might be subject to greater scrutiny by external parties, including the public, and thereby would benefit from maximum transparency) or topics for which there was disagreement amongst experts. Some areas addressed by EFSA have considerable potential impact, for example related to public health or animal trade, and these topics could be prioritised for SR. Under severe time constraints, a full SR may not be possible, but a rapid review can be considered. However rapid reviews are not a substitute for systematic reviews. Adoption of rapid reviews exchanges one set of concerns (time and resources contracts) for another (lack of robustness and comprehensiveness). In the view of the Consortium, the continuation of training opportunities is important. Appropriate commissioning of SR expertise is an important step in establishing the role of the methodology in EFSA risk assessments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it