Guidelines, Consensus Conferences and Overviews (Meta-analysis)

In the practice of oncology, and even in sub-specialties such as the care of women with breast cancer, it can be challenging and sometimes overwhelming to keep up to date with the latest discoveries and publications. In the past few years, the review article [1, 2] was the standard vehicle for keeping up to date for most clinicians. Review articles of this type, while often excellent summations of the available data, did not use explicit criteria for the inclusion or weighting of evidence from articles which often had wide variability in methodologic quality. Furthermore, today’s methods of rapid computer-based formalized literature retrieval were not available at that time. In spite of that limitation, however, published articles were usually accessible using hand searching methods which are still an important part of all literature reviews and guideline productions [3–5]. More problematic in such reviews was the lack of access to unpublished material, since review articles and indeed even consensus documents, guidelines and meta-analyses of published data do not usually attempt to retrieve such data.