← return to articles

About Bird's Eye Reviews

Bird's Eye Reviews are a new form of literature review that present information about scientific articles in an interactive dashboard. 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. 

Here are some 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 have evidence supporting them? What outcomes / endpoints were studied?  

  • 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. It can be useful to see all the treatments being researched, to get ideas. Additionally, these reviews make it easy to see gaps in the research such as treatments that are popular in the ME/CFS community and have ancedtoal evidence but haven't recieved scientific study.  

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 predatory journals (Beal's list). 

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.

== The Bird's Eye Review Studio ==