The importance of adequate intervention descriptions in minimizing research waste and increasing reproducibility rates has gained attention in the past few years. Improving the completeness of intervention descriptions in systematic reviews is likely to be a cost-effective contribution towards facilitating evidence implementation from reviews – a statement that is true for the clinical area as well as for the preclinical and basic research field.
In this article, Tammy C Hoffmann and colleagues explore the problem and implications of incomplete intervention details during the planning, conduct, and reporting of systematic reviews and make recommendations for review authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors. The authors call for everyone with a role in producing, reviewing, and publishing systematic reviews to commit to help solving this remediable barrier caused by inadequate intervention descriptions.