How to report a review? [Come si scrive una review?]

In this contribution we would like to underline another issue: how to report a review? The need of specific reporting guidelines for medical journals is beyond dispute. With that regard a number of statements were developed by groups of experts to facilitate reporting of research studies. Most medical journals, including British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine, often require compliance to all or some of the following guidelines: CONSORT Statement (reporting of randomized controlled trials), STARD (reporting of diagnostic accuracy studies), STROBE (reporting of observational studies in epidemiology), PRISMA (reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses) and MOOSE (reporting of meta-analyses of observational studies). The present letter concerns the standards of reporting in research, publication in medical journals and wishes to give an emphasis to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement. There is no doubt that, according to the PRISMA statement [2], the number of authors for a systematic review needs to be at least 2 (“Eligibility assessment to be performed independently in an unblended standardized manner by 2 reviewers”).