EPPI Christmas 2023!

Shiny EPPI people!
This year we have welcomed two new team members and the return of a former EPPI colleague!

• Silvy Matthew joined the team for our new Evidence Synthesis Group (see below for details) – working across projects on screening for diabetic eye and on designing evidence synthesis methodology to capture contextual factors in a more helpful way for informing decision-makers.
• Hossein Dehdarirad is an information scientist whose primary interests are information retrieval and management, developing search strategies for evidence synthesis projects, recommender systems, text analysis, machine learning, as well as scientometrics.
• We’re also delighted to welcome back Mel Bond as a Research Fellow after a stint as a Lecturer (Digital Technology Education) at the University of South Australia. 

We celebrated two of our team members whose contributions to the EPPI Centre and beyond, were recognised. Gillian Stokes became an Associate Professor of Inclusive Social Research and Rachael Edwards is now a Senior Research Fellow.
We were super-proud of our colleagues James Thomas, Rebecca Rees, Sandy Oliver, Mel Bond and Irene Kwan who were recognised for being in the top 2% of scientists in the world in the Elsevier and Stanford University’s 2023 list of the worlds most cited scholars of their field!

New reviews published in 2023

Work that has been published this year for the London-York NIHR Policy Research Programme Reviews Facility with our partners at the Centre for Research and Dissemination and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, includes:

• Defensive healthcare practice: Systematic review of qualitative studies and systems-based logic model
• What are embedded researchers and what influence do they have in public health settings?
• Young people and online eating disorder content: a qualitative evidence synthesis
• Decarbonising Home Energy Through Behaviour Change: How to Overcome Barriers to Green Purchase Decisions

Please visit the EPPI Centre website for a comprehensive list of published reviews.

New ventures

London Alliance for the Coproduction of Evidence Synthesis (LACES): This year we were excited to launch LACES, which is one of nine Evidence Synthesis Groups funded across the UK by the NIHR. LACES is a collaboration of three UCL centres including the EPPI Centre, the UCL Co-Production collective and the Health Economics Policy Lab. The team will undertake a rolling programme of policy-commissioned reviews during a five-year period. Watch out for publications from LACES in 2024!

Much of our current work has proven to be very topical, such as our growing body of reviews around equity, machine learning and artificial intelligence. We are excited about publications on these topics in the coming year.

Key presentations

We were delighted to welcome the return of the Cochrane Colloquium in 2023, especially as it was on our home turf in London!
Here’s a few of the team’s workshops from this year’s colloquium…

• What does good co-production in evidence synthesis look and feel like?
• Integrating the findings of a qualitative evidence synthesis (QES) with the findings of a review of intervention effects
• How to use and evaluate OpenAlex tools for efficient automated updating of systematic reviews and maps in EPPI-Reviewer
• EPPI-Reviewer: review-production software that adapts to your needs

And a few of our presentations…

• Operationalising decolonisation in systematic reviews: can current tools help to mitigate for bias?
• Challenges in using RoB2: worked example from a systematic review of remote therapies for alcohol and drug misuse
• Missing and masked: equity in a systematic review of remote interventions for substance misuse
• Is Quality Appraisal Enough? Confidence in Heterogeneous Interventions’ Effectiveness
• Methods used in systematic reviews to conceptualise dimensions of health equity impacts of public health interventions: umbrella review

Looking forward to 2024...

We’re already looking forward to catching up with national and international colleagues in September at the Global Evidence Summit in Prague!

And, we’re also very much looking forward to hosting some exciting presentations at the London Evidence Syntheses and Research Use Seminars which we run with colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). Kicking off the 2024 series on 17th January, will be our very own James Thomas who will be discussing New 'AI' technologies for evidence synthesis: how do they work, and can we trust them? – we hope you can join us for this talk, either in person or online!

We hope that the festive season will be all that you hoped for and that 2024 will bring lots of exciting projects for you too.

Wishing you all a wonderful festive break!