My team is diving into the world of living systematic reviews (LSR) as part of our efforts to synthesize COVID-19 evidence, and our first LSR was just published in Annals of Internal Medicine:

Risks and Impact of Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors or Angiotensin-Receptor Blockers on SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Adults

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1515

I was responsible for the initial search, as well as the search updates that make this review “living”. I’ve never worked on an LSR before, so it was a new experience for me to adapt my usual search process to this long-term project. I’ll admit, I dove into this project without thinking to much about the actual workflow, so the search process was a bit disorganized at the beginning. But as I’ve done more research on LSR processes, I’ve integrated some new tools and practices into my search process to make things easier to manage:

• Scheduling a set time each week to manage search updates and organize the new results
• Setting up automatic search alerts whenever possible
• Using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the initial and update searches, including the dates and number of results
• Using a citation manager (we use EndNote) to store result records in one place, and to facilitate de-duplication and export results into an easy-to-read Word document

If you are planning to work on an LSR, or if you’re just curious about the process, I highly recommend checking out the Cochrane guidance.