Number of systematic reviews registered in PROSPERO passes 300,000: How the numbers have changed over time

Posted on 6 January 2025

PROSPERO, which is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research in the UK has since 2011 provided researchers with a free, searchable, online platform for registrations of systematic review protocols with a direct health-related outcome. Registrations have increased year-on-year resulting in a substantial number of new protocols being submitted and published daily.

By the end of the first year of its launch, 359 registered had been published on the PROSPERO website. The current number of published records is 306,444 (as of 11^th December 2024). Taking November 2024 as a snapshot, 6,458 records were published in this month alone. This equates to approximately 215 records published per day. In other words, for every 40 hours in November 2024, more records were published than the total number of records published in PROSPERO’s first year.

Bar chart showing records published in PROSPERO per year Within the first year of launch, there were 1,076 registered users. In November 2024, there were over 7,000 new registered users in just one month - seven times the number of new registered users during PROSPERO’s first year.

To keep pace with this demand we are releasing a new version of PROSPERO in early 2025, which will offer more automatic processing features ensuring timely publication of registration records.

With increasing numbers of registrations comes the risk of duplication and research waste. The new version of PROSPERO will also offer new functionality that will help identify duplicate or very similar topics at the point of submission and help researchers focus their efforts on new reviews rather than on duplicating research.

The new version of PROSPERO will also have a fresh new look and be easier to use. We look forward to introducing it to the systematic review community this year.