Content area experts as authors: helpful or harmful for systematic reviews and meta-analyses?

Systematic reviews commonly include experts in the topic area as authors, as advised by the Cochrane Collaboration and the US Institute of Medicine (box 1).1 2 The Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research in the United States and Canada3 expects content experts to become authors of its evidence based practice reports and guidelines (Stephanie Chang, personal communication), as does the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.4 In many countries, content area experts and their professional societies have a primary role in initiating health technology assessments, setting the agenda, specifying the questions and their boundaries, deciding what data should be included, and how the results should be interpreted and applied. Such experts are therefore probably the most influential contributors to these reports, even if none of them are authors.

However, as evidence based medicine has gained momentum it has become clear that expert advice is often unreliable,5 raising questions about the validity of including content area experts as authors. We also wonder whether the pervasive incorporation of content area experts in systematic reviews and health technology assessments signifies the taming of evidence based medicine …