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About Bird's Eye Reviews

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The Metascience Observatory is pioneering a new form of AI-assisted literature review we call the Bird’s Eye Review. 

Bird’s Eye Reviews give people summary data on all papers published on a given topic. Previously there has been no interface that enables what Bird’s Eye Reviews enable. 

Bird’s Eye Reviews are presented as dashboards, and some will also have an article summarizing major findings that will appear on our Substack. Here are questions that Bird’s Eye Reviews can help answer: 

  • Where are studies on X taking place? 

  • What types of studies on X are being published (observational, RCT, cell culture, animal, etc)?

  • What treatments for X are being studied? Which were helpful? How were they helpful? 

  • What causal mechanisms for X are being researched?

We believe Bird’s Eye Reviews are particularly useful for complex unsolved diseases that have been highly studied like Long COVID, ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and others. Here’s how they are useful:

  • Identifying gaps. There are often gaps - popular treatments that aren’t being researched, or a lack of RCTs. 

  • See all treatments. It can be useful to see all the treatments being researched, to get ideas. 

Here are the general principles behind how we do a Bird’s Eye Review: 

The end-user decides how to filter

  • Our Bird’s Eye Reviews seek to cover all papers published on a topic, regardless of country of origin, journal, or methodology. 

  • By keeping all papers, we enable richer data for metascientific understanding of what is going on in science writ large. 

  • The only journal filter we apply is to remove journals. 

We include as many non-English studies as we can

  • Up until now, reviews and meta-analysis have focused on one language – English.

  • However, language bias is a documented phenomena in meta-analysis: “Chinese RCTs with positive results are more likely to be published in English and indexed in English bibliographic databases than those with negative result”  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2766375 . 

  • Russian set of approved drugs (State Pharmacopoeia) and investigational drugs different than in “the West”. So including studies published in Russia should pick up novel treatments.