attracting 85 participants from 13 countries. business and economics due to the different nature of research fields outside of the natural sciences, the aforementioned methodological steps cannot easily be applied in all areas of business research. some attempts to transfer the procedures from medicine to business research have been made, including a step-by-step approach, and developing a standard procedure for conducting systematic literature reviews in business and economics. the campbell & cochrane economics methods group (c-cemg) works to improve the inclusion of economic evidence into cochrane and campbell systematic reviews of interventions, to enhance the usefulness of review findings as a component for decision-making. such economic evidence is crucial for health technology assessment processes. international development research systematic reviews are increasingly prevalent in other fields, such as international development research. subsequently, several donors (including the uk department for international development (dfid) and ausaid) are focusing more attention and resources on testing the appropriateness of systematic reviews in assessing the impacts of development and humanitarian interventions. environment the collaboration for environmental evidence (cee) works to achieve a sustainable global environment and the conservation of biodiversity. the cee has a journal titled environmental evidence which publishes systematic reviews, review protocols and systematic maps on impacts of human activity and the effectiveness of management interventions. environmental health and toxicology systematic reviews are a relatively recent innovation in the field of environmental health and toxicology. although mooted in the mid-2000s, the first full frameworks for conduct of systematic reviews of environmental health evidence were only published in 2014 by the us national toxicology program's office of health assessment and translation and the navigation guide at the university of california san francisco's program on reproductive health and the environment. uptake has since been rapid, with the estimated number of systematic reviews in the field doubling since 2016 and the first consensus recommendations on best practice, as a precursor to a more general standard, being published in 2020. review tools a 2019 publication identified 15 systematic review tools and ranked them according to the number of 'critical features' as required to perform a systematic review, including: distillersr: a proprietary, paid web application swift active screener: a proprietary, paid web application covidence: a proprietary, paid web application and cochrane technology platform. rayyan: a proprietary, free of charge web application sysrev: a proprietary, freemium web application limitations while systematic reviews involve a highly rigorous approach to synthesizing the evidence, they still have several limitations. out-dated or risk of bias while systematic reviews are regarded as the strongest form of evidence, a 2003 review of 300 studies found that not all systematic reviews were equally reliable, and that their reporting can be improved by a universally agreed upon set of standards and guidelines. a further study by the same group found that of 100 systematic reviews monitored, 7% needed updating at the time of publication, another 4% within a year, and another 11% within 2 years; this figure was higher in rapidly changing fields of medicine, especially cardiovascular medicine. a 2003 study suggested that extending searches beyond major databases, perhaps into grey literature, would increase the effectiveness of reviews. some authors have highlighted problems with systematic reviews, particularly those conducted by cochrane, noting that published reviews are often biased, out of date and excessively long. cochrane reviews have been criticized as not being sufficiently critical in the selection of trials and including too many of low quality. they proposed several solutions, including limiting studies in meta-analyses and reviews to registered clinical trials, requiring that original data be made available for statistical checking, paying greater attention to sample size estimates, and eliminating dependence on only published data. some of these difficulties were noted as early as 1994: much poor research arises because researchers feel compelled for career reasons to carry out research that they are ill-equipped to perform, and nobody stops them.— altman dg, 1994 methodological limitations of meta-analysis have also been noted. another concern is that the methods used to conduct a systematic review are sometimes changed once researchers see the available trials they are going to include. some websites have described retractions of systematic reviews and published reports of studies included in published systematic reviews. eligibility criteria must be justifiable and not arbitrary (for example, the date range searched) as this may affect the perceived quality of the review. limited reporting of clinical trials and data from human studies the 'alltrials' campaign highlights that around half of clinical trials have never reported results and works to improve reporting. this lack of reporting has extremely serious implications for research, including systematic reviews, as it is only possible to synthesize data of published studies. in addition, 'positive' trials were twice as likely to be published as those with 'negative' results. at present, it is legal for-profit companies to conduct clinical trials and not publish the results. for example, in the past 10 years 8.7 million patients have taken part in trials that have not published results. these factors mean that it is likely there is a significant publication bias, with only 'positive' or perceived favourable results being published. a recent systematic review of industry sponsorship and research outcomes concluded that 'sponsorship of drug and device studies by the manufacturing company leads to more favorable efficacy results and conclusions than sponsorship by other sources' and that the existence of an industry bias that cannot be explained by standard 'risk of bias' assessments. systematic reviews of such a bias may amplify the effect, although it is important to note that the flaw is in the reporting of research generally, not in the systematic review method. poor compliance with review reporting guidelines the rapid growth of systematic reviews in recent years has been accompanied by the attendant issue of poor compliance with guidelines, particularly in areas such as declaration of registered study protocols, funding source declaration, risk of bias data, issues resulting from data abstraction, and description of clear study objectives. a host of studies have identified weaknesses in the rigour and reproducibility of search strategies in systematic reviews. to remedy this issue, a new prisma guideline extension called prisma-s is being developed to improve the quality, reporting, and reproducibility of systematic review search strategies. furthermore, tools and checklists for peer-reviewing search strategies have been created, such as the peer review of electronic search strategies (press) guidelines. a key challenge for using systematic reviews in clinical practice and healthcare policy is assessing the quality of a given review. consequently, a range of appraisal tools to evaluate systematic reviews have been designed. the two most popular measurement instruments and scoring tools for systematic review quality assessment are amstar 2 (a measurement tool to assess the methodological quality of systematic reviews) and robis (risk of bias in systematic reviews); however, these are not appropriate for all systematic review types.