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.
June 2026 Seminar
- Title: Stopping criteria for the responsible use of AI-assisted screening for systematic reviews
- Speaker: Max Callaghan, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research.
- Date and time: Wednesday 17th June 2026, 12:30 - 13:45 (GMT)
- Admission: Free, accessible online
- In-person attendance: Manson Lecture Theatre, LSHTM, Keppel Street, London, WC1E 7HT
- Online attendance: tbc
Session details: Using machine learning to reduce the effort of screening has been discussed for decades, and the arrival of generative AI has promised even greater work savings. However, the systematic review community has not arrived at a common understanding of how work savings can be achieved while maintaining rigorous methodological standards.
The most common paradigm for AI-assisted screening is prioritised screening, where AI is used to predict the relevance of unseen documents, which are then screened by hand in descending order. This results in the identification of all eligible studies long before all studies have been screened. However, this only saves labour if screening is stopped early, which always carries a risk that eligible studies are missed. Stopping criteria are commonly used to balance the costs of screening manually with the risks of missing eligible studies.
In anticipation of the possible update of guidance in the Cochrane handbook on AI-assisted screening and stopping criteria, Max will discuss what makes a stopping criterion compatible with the maintenance of rigorous methodological standards. After presenting evidence from a recent evaluation of the reliability of stopping criteria, Max will set out considerations for how these could and should be implemented in practice.
Max Callaghan is a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research. He works on the development of methods to use AI responsibly to assist evidence synthesis. He is an associate convenor of the AI methods group, a joint Methods Group between Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence (CEE), and a methods editor for AI for Campbell Systematic Reviews.
Click here to see details and recordings of previous events