London Evidence Syntheses and Research Use Seminars
The EPPI Centre and The Centre for Evaluation at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) jointly host the ‘London Evidence Syntheses and Research Use Seminars’. These seminars aim to encourage discussion and information-sharing on challenges and innovations in evidence syntheses methods.
The free of charge hybrid seminars are hosted in London but can be attended online. They take place every other month on a Wednesday between 12.30 and 13.45. They include 25-30 min presentations and plenty of time for discussion. Recordings of previous seminars: https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/Default.aspx?tabid=3317.
If you have queries, would like to suggest a topic, or to be added to the mailing list to be notified of future sessions, contact: katy.sutcliffe@ucl.ac.uk.
February 2026 Seminar
- Title: AI-enabled systematic review platforms: how well do they perform?
- Speaker: Dr Charis Wong
- Date and time: Wednesday 4th February 2026, 12:30 - 13:45 (GMT)
- Admission: Free, accessible online
- In-person attendance: Manson Lecture Theatre, LSHTM, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT
- Online attendance: https://lshtm.zoom.us/j/87060468154
Session details: Traditional systematic reviews are time and resource intensive, limiting their application. There has been a recent emergence of AI-enabled systematic review platforms promising faster and more comprehensive reviews. However, independent validation of these platforms is needed to assess their suitability and potential to augment or replace human reviewer efforts. We evaluated the performance of three platforms – Elicit.AI, Nested Knowledge and Scispace – across different systematic review stages. We aimed to replicate three recently published systematic reviews and compare the performance of each platform against original published findings. In this talk, I'll discuss our preliminary findings which highlight the significant variability in the performance of AI-enabled systematic review platforms.
Speaker details: Charis is an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer and Consultant Neurologist at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in neurodegenerative diseases, in particular developing methodology to systematically identify, evaluate and report evidence to improve drug selection for clinical trials. She studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and graduated in 2012 with honours. She underwent clinical training across various hospitals within South East Scotland, and was a neurology registrar with NHS Lothian. She joined the Anne Rowling Clinic as a Clinical Trial Fellow in 2019, working across various research studies in neurological conditions. She was part of the trial development group for MND-SMART (mnd-smart.org), a multi-arm multi-stage clinical trial in motor neuron disease (MND). She undertook a PhD supervised by Professor Malcolm Macleod, Professor Siddharthan Chandran, and Professor Neil Carragher where she developed methods to identify, evaluate, and prioritise candidate drugs for MND clinical trials, specifically MND-SMART. She is continuing to develop this work with the aim of improving the framework and expanding its applications to other disease areas. In her spare time, she enjoys being in the outdoors, hillwalking, and exploring the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
Click here to see previous events