Speaking of ASCO, their methodology for recommendations is conducting their own systematic review and they start with Cochrane.

>Upon approval of the Protocol, a systematic review of the medical literature is conducted. ASCO staff use the information entered into the Protocol, including the clinical questions, inclusion/exclusion criteria for qualified studies, search terms/phrases, and range of study dates, to perform the systematic review. Literature searches of selected databases, including The Cochrane Library and Medline (via PubMed) are performed.

>After the systematic review is completed, a GRADE evidence profile and summary of findings table is developed to provide the guideline panels with the information about the body of evidence, judgments about the quality of evidence, statistical results, and certainty of the evidence ratings for each pre-specified included outcome.

Rapid criteria:

The criteria for a rapid recommendation update are:
1. that the identified evidence is of high methodological quality,
2. there is high certainty among experts that results are clinically meaningful to practice,
3. the identified evidence represents a significant shift in clinical practice from a recommendation in an existing ASCO guideline (e.g., change from recommending against the use of a particular therapy to recommending the use of that therapy; or a reversal to a recommendation) such that it should not wait for a scheduled guideline update.

A systematic literature review focused on the updated recommendation will be conducted by ASCO staff. Specifically, the immediate past guideline literature search strategy will be updated and filtered by search criteria specific to evidence informing the recommendation under review. All identified evidence will be quality- appraised using the GRADE methodology as outlined in Section 10 of this ASCO Guideline Methods Manual. The procedures used to draft the rapid recommendation update and deliberations by the expert panel will follow routine methods for all guidance products as outlined in this ASCO Guideline Methods Manual.

ASCO position on meta-analyses:

All these reasons can be used to make the excuse that a systematic review and meta -analysis should not be done, especially if resources aren’t available to hand search all journals of all languages, etc.

The solution is not to avoid doing a systematic review or meta-analysis, but to reveal to the reader what short cuts were taken (e.g., we included only peer reviewed published studies, or restricted our eligibility to studies published in English). This shows transparency, and then the readers can decide how important this problem is in applying the results of your meta -analysis to their situation.

Myths about meta-analyses
• A literature-based meta-analysis is not worth doing

So systematic reviews and meta-analyses are no longer useful?

That you're arguing with anecdotes is proof itself of why EBM is important.

>There are 2 such updates this year already. If the primacy of meta-analyses were so great, why would they bother to issue rapid updates of what you class as low quality evidence?

Both March 2023 updates are identical.

https://old-prod.asco.org/sites/new-www.asco.org/files/conte...

https://old-prod.asco.org/sites/new-www.asco.org/files/conte...

https://old-prod.asco.org/sites/new-www.asco.org/files/conte...