Can a Quality Systematic Review Have a Single Author?

Systematic reviews are generally considered a team undertaking, requiring sustained effort from many over time. However, published systematic reviews may have as few as one author, calling into question their methodological rigor. For this study, a dataset of 630 previously identified systematic reviews from five high impact general and internal medicine journals from 2008-2012 was used.[1] The number of authors and the number of inclusion and exclusion criteria (or first pass) screeners were extracted from each article in duplicate. The number of authors and screeners was statistically compared to compliance with Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommended standards for finding and assessing individual studies (ANOVA) as well as overall reproducibility (chi square).