Weight of Evidence: What Is the State of the Science?

摘要

Even though Weed's review is clearly limited and may be misleading, most of his recommendations and conclusions are reasonable and valid. If this article had been presented as an opinion based on a relatively small number of papers (such as a "Perspective" article in Risk Analysis), rather than represented as state-of-the-science, then we would not have written this letter. The point we would like to make is that a "state-of-the-science" review is not an easy task in such an interdisciplinary field as risk analysis. We should be humble about our ability to conduct such comprehensive reviews. Following formal guidance for writing review papers is an essential but not sufficient condition for state-of-the-science reviews. Consultation with experts in the field, searching multiple databases, finding landmark and classic studies, and searching gray literature and federal and state guidance documents may be more important than completeness and traceability of the review methodology. Comparison of Weed's review with other reviews on the same topic shows that reviews done with adequate selection of relevant studies are more informative.