Inclusion criteria
PROSPERO includes details of any planned or on-going systematic review that has a health related outcome.
PROSPERO accepts:
Systematic review protocols assessing:
- Interventions (Including qualitative and individual participant data reviews)
- Diagnostic accuracy
- Prognostic factors
- Prevention
- Epidemiological reviews relevant to health and social care
- Public health
- Service delivery in health and social care
- Methodological
Further information on protocol development specific to review types is accessible below.
Requirements for registration
- A full protocol should be ready before registering with PROSPERO
- Submissions must be made before data extraction commences (from October 2019)
- Registration forms must be complete.
- Submissions must be in English (search strategies and protocols attached to a record may be in any language).
PROSPERO does not accept:
- Systematic reviews without an outcome of clear relevance to the health of humans
- Scoping reviews
- Literature reviews that use a systematic search
- Systematic reviews assessing sports performance as an outcome
- Methodological reviews that assess ONLY the quality of reporting
- Systematic critical appraisals
Other considerations
- Cochrane protocols are automatically uploaded- To avoid duplication of records, Cochrane protocols should not be registered separately with PROSPERO.
- Systematic reviews of animal studies only are not eligible for registration in the section of PROSPERO dedicated to reviews of human studies. These should be registered in the section of PROSPERO for animal studies.
- Systematic reviews of human studies only are not eligible for registration in the section of PROSPERO dedicated to reviews of animal studies. These should be registered in the section of PROSPERO for human studies.
- Systematic reviews of in-vitro studies only are not eligible for registration on PROSPERO. We recommend registering such protocols elsewhere, for instance on Open Science Framework.