TY - JOUR T1 - Stay alive! What are living systematic reviews and what are their advantages and challenges? JF - British Journal of Sports Medicine JO - Br J Sports Med SP - 519 LP - 520 DO - 10.1136/bjsports-2020-103490 VL - 55 IS - 10 AU - Marinus Winters AU - Robert-Jan de Vos AU - Marienke van Middelkoop AU - Michael Skovdal Rathleff AU - Adam Weir Y1 - 2021/05/01 UR - http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/10/519.abstract N2 - Living systematic reviews (LSRs) are ‘high-quality, up-to-date online summaries of health research that are updated as new research becomes available’.1 You may not yet be familiar with living reviews as the first ones in sports medicine were only published this year.2 3 These are ‘living’ documents where essential aspects like the search, risk of bias assessment and drawing conclusions are updated regularly. This increases their life expectancy. Our editorial discusses what LSRs are, along with the advantages and challenges.SRs have changed medicine for the better and allow us to make better informed decisions with our patients. While essential, the time and resources required to perform and publish SRs are major drawbacks. By the time a review is published, the search is often at least a year old. It takes from 2.5 to 6.5 years once a randomised controlled trial (RCT) is published for it to be included in a new review.1 This is likely to apply for other areas too, such as diagnosis, prognosis and aetiology.Having taken a long time to create, SRs then have a limited life span: new studies are … ER -