About the Living Evidence Atlas

The Living Evidence Atlas provides a Living Global Landscape of Living Evidence by conducting an always up-to-date map of all living evidence efforts that are produced worldwide. By doing so, we expect to provide a comprehensive map of all centres and people that are engaged in living evidence production to facilitate learning insights exchange among them.

The Living Evidence Atlas captures all living guidelines, evidence synthesis, evidence maps and repositories to centralize this information in one place.

This initiative is produced by Alive, as part of its Learning Strategy in collaborating with the broader living evidence community. You can find more about our learning efforts in the Alive Learning Forum website.

Brief description of methods

The Living Evidence Atlas is produced by conducting a rigorous process of collecting and curating different living evidence efforts.

Searching for living evidence efforts

First, a team of researchers search for living evidence efforts. Here, at least three complementary efforts are conducted. First, a search strategy is run every six-months to capture new living evidence efforts (search strategy available upon request). Secondly, a google scholar alert is set to identify any potential article that might be relevant to living evidence. Finally, a consultation to key stakeholders is also commonly conducted, so we can identify living evidence efforts that are not necessarily published on academic articles.

Selecting living evidence efforts

The Living Evidence Atlas includes all living evidence efforts that classify themselves as living. These include living guidelines, living evidence syntheses, living evidence maps, and living evidence repositories.

Curating and classifying living evidence efforts

Living evidence efforts captured are curated by collecting basic information such as their title, URL, contact information and country of the corresponding author or project lead, and the dates of the first and last update. Additionally, the following information is assigned to each living evidence effort:

• Topic: An inductive and living classification was created to represent the wide variety of topics addressed by living evidence efforts. The classification includes:

• Cancer & Oncology
• COVID-19 pandemic
• Critical & acute care
• Education
• Environment & climate action
• Infectious diseases
• Inflammatory & auto-immune diseases
• Maternal, child & reproductive health
• Mental health, addictions & dementias
• Methods and evidence use
• Musculoskeletal conditions & rehabilitation
• Neurological conditions
• Non-communicable diseases (NCDs)
• Oral health
• Public health, health systems and policy

• Type of living evidence effort: Classifying each living evidence effort in whether it is a guideline, synthesis, map or repository, based on the own description by the authors of the effort.
• Stage: Representing in what stage of the process a living evidence effort is, which could be in the protocol stage, ongoing, or stopped (no longer living). If no information is available, or the latest version is produced in 2023 or before, this information is set as unclear.
• Status: This field describes whether the living evidence effort is active or not. Similar to the stage, if the latest version is produced in 2023 or before, this information is set as unclear.

Presenting the map of living evidence efforts

Finally, the curated results are shown in both a map and tabular formats on the website.