When beauty is but skin deep: dealing with problematic studies in systematic reviews

Systematic reviews provide high‐quality assessment of the evidence for healthcare interventions, but this assessment is predicated on the trustworthiness of the studies they include. The presence of untrustworthy, or ‘problematic’, studies in the literature poses challenges for systematic reviewers and is a threat to the reliability of systematic reviews. This is compounded by the absence of an agreed definition of what constitutes a problematic...