Editorial Letter

Dear Readers

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in the field of biomedicine are considered as the top-level evidence by researchers, professionals and even politicians. The number of these studies are increasing, worldwide. Although several reporting guidelines and checklists are developed to improve the reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and the majority of systematic reviews are now registered, they do not guarantee the quality of the published work and their cautious evaluation is still needed. Therefore, low-quality reviews might be misleading.

We see that the systematic reviews and meta-analyses get published just because they have led to a significant association. However, high-quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses which reject the results of the previous systematic reviews or improve the previous findings hardly get published. This is while the misleading SRMs might adversely affect practice.

 Critical Comments in Biomedicine (CCB) is an electronic international review journal published semiannually by Shahid Sadoughi University of Medical Sciences. CCB publishes review articles (including narrative reviews, systematic reviews, systematic review and meta-analyses, review of reviews), commentaries, letters to editors, and systematic review protocols written in the field of biomedicine. The journal particularly welcomes the review articles with null findings and the updated reviews. Our team believes that professional journals like CCB might better evaluate such articles by gathering the experts interested in the field which makes the published evidence more reliable. The journal is dedicated to publishing review articles, only considering their quality without taking the manuscripts’ readership, their results and the possibility of getting citations. CCB is an open-access journal and also does not charge a publication fee.

On behalf of the Editorial Board, I invite the interested researchers with experience in conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses to join our Editorial Board and also use Critical Comments in Biomedicine to publish their reviews. Information for authors is available on CCB’s website: https://ccbjournal.ssu.ac.ir Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions/ comments.

Sincerely yours,