Publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has announced the launch of Evidence Based Preclinical Medicine (EBPM) as part of the Wiley Open Access publishing program. EBPM is the first journal dedicated to publishing systematic review protocols and systematic reviews which summarise data from animal studies on subjects relevant to human health.
Systematic reviews are a form of meta-analysis to identify, appraise, select and synthesize all high quality research evidence relevant to a specific question. EBPM's synthesis of preclinical evidence will improve evaluation of the potential success in future clinical trials, providing transparent and accurate reporting of research studies and improving the reliability and value of medical research. While systematic reviews are well established in the health sciences, they are not prevalent within life sciences.
The journal has developed a helpdesk to guide practitioners through the processes of systematic review and to help authors prepare their study datasets for publication. In addition to the reviews, the journal publishes protocols describing the proposed approach for a systematic review enabling readers to distinguish between hypothesis and evidence-based observations.
EBPM requires that all datasets supplementary to the reviews be held in a public repository. By providing tools to access these datasets, the journal will ensure that information collected in the context of systematic reviews will be publicly available.
The journal is edited by Associate Professor David Howells, co-division head of the stroke division at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and Professor Malcolm Macleod, whose team at the University of Edinburgh has led the development and application of systematic review and meta-analysis of animal studies modelling stroke.
