2025 reinforced a tension that evidence synthesis teams across academic, industry, and public sector settings continue to navigate. Demand for high-quality, defensible evidence has grown steadily, while timelines, budgets, and expectations have tightened under increasing pressure to deliver results more quickly.
At the same time, advances in automation and artificial intelligence reshaped expectations around speed. As these tools became more visible and accessible, the conversation shifted from whether they belong in evidence workflows to how they can be applied responsibly. Concerns around transparency, reproducibility, and human accountability remained central, even as expectations for faster turnaround intensified.
What emerged over the course of the year was a clearer articulation of a core challenge facing the field: faster evidence production without trust risks failure, while rigorous processes that cannot scale risk falling out of step with real-world decision timelines. In response, 2025 marked a broader shift toward more deliberate evaluation of how tools, methods, and human judgment must work together.
These lessons now inform how the field is approaching evidence generation, synthesis, and stewardship as it looks toward 2026 – seeking approaches that preserve accountability and rigor while helping teams keep pace with growing demand.
What 2025 Made Clear
Over the past year, the pressures facing evidence synthesis became more visible, and more consequential. Across academic, industry, and public sector settings, teams were asked to deliver rigorous, defensible evidence at a pace and scale that traditional approaches were not designed to support.
While established methods remain foundational to evidence synthesis, the past year exposed growing friction in how this work is carried out. Updating reviews, coordinating across teams, and maintaining consistency over time increasingly strained existing workflows as expectations around speed, transparency, and accountability continued to rise.
Importantly, these challenges were not the result of gaps in expertise or methodological care. Instead, they reflected a structural misalignment between how evidence work has historically been organized and how it is now relied upon in real-world decision-making contexts.
What became clear in 2025 was that evidence synthesis must evolve, not by lowering standards, but by rethinking how work is structured, supported, and sustained over time. Preserving rigor while enabling teams to operate more responsively and sustainably emerged as a shared priority across the field, shaping how organizations approached change throughout the year and informing conversations heading into 2026.
Where AI Fit, and Where It Did Not
As the year progressed, artificial intelligence shifted from abstract discussion to more practical, operational use within evidence synthesis workflows. Across sectors, teams explored automation as a way to manage increasing workloads, particularly in areas such as screening, document handling, and data extraction.
Experience across the field also reinforced clear boundaries. While automation proved effective in reducing manual effort, its value depended on how it was applied. AI did not replace methodological expertise, transparent decision-making, or accountability for outcomes. Instead, results varied based on the presence of human oversight, alignment with established methods, and integration into auditable workflows.
By the end of the year, the conversation around AI had matured. The prevailing lesson was not whether to use automation, but how to do so deliberately. Leading teams treated AI as an assistive layer – one that helps experts keep pace with growing demands while preserving rigor, trust, and responsibility as evidence synthesis continues to evolve into 2026.
How We Responded in Practice
In response to the realities shaping evidence synthesis in 2025, PICO Portal focused on strengthening how evidence work gets done in practice, reducing friction across core workflows while preserving rigor, transparency, and traceability.
Our efforts centered on translating emerging demands into concrete improvements across product, services, and education, with an emphasis on helping teams manage scale more efficiently under real-world constraints.
Product and Workflow Improvements
We introduced and refined workflow enhancements across key stages of evidence synthesis, including screening, document handling, and data extraction. Improvements such as Priority Screening, Smart PDF Upload, and expanded extraction support were designed to reduce manual burden while maintaining clear visibility into how decisions are made.
Automation and Integrations
To improve access to source materials and streamline review workflows, we expanded integrations that support full-text acquisition and content ingestion. This included direct connections to services such as Article Galaxy, enabling teams to link articles directly into active reviews and reduce delays caused by manual retrieval.
Services and Supported Workflows
For teams navigating more complex or time-sensitive projects, PICO Portal PLUS+ managed review services continued to grow. These services provided structured, hands-on support across screening, appraisal, extraction, and end-to-end project coordination, particularly for organizations operating with limited internal capacity.
Education and Dialogue
Alongside product development, we invested in education and ongoing dialogue through webinars, workshops, and external forums. These efforts focused on sharing practical guidance around responsible automation in evidence synthesis, reflecting our belief that tools and understanding must evolve together.
Together, these initiatives reflect PICO Portal’s commitment to supporting evidence teams through a period of transition, balancing innovation with the methodological standards that evidence-based work depends on.
Engaging the Evidence Community
Throughout 2025, PICO Portal engaged with researchers, practitioners, and institutions across public and private sectors to explore how evidence synthesis is evolving in practice.
These engagements offered environments for shared learning and critical discussion. Through events like the AI Literacy Workshop at AcademyHealth’s Annual Research Meeting, and research presented at external conferences like ISPOR 2025 in Montreal, we collaborated with academic, government, and industry stakeholders navigating similar methodological and operational challenges.
Across these conversations, a consistent theme emerged: meaningful progress in evidence synthesis depends not on tools alone, but on shared standards, informed dialogue, and collective learning across the field. Advancing evidence work responsibly requires ongoing engagement with the people and institutions shaping how evidence is produced, evaluated, and trusted.
Some Numbers from 2025
In 2025, PICO Portal’s role in evidence synthesis continued to expand across disciplines and use cases, some of which has made it to the public domain:
- 30+ peer-reviewed publications citing PICO Portal for deduplication, screening, risk of bias or data extraction
- 10+ methodological and AI-focused studies discussing PICO Portal as a core evidence synthesis platform
- Publications spanning clinical medicine, public health, environmental science, HEOR, and health services research
Looking Ahead to 2026
As evidence synthesis moves into 2026, expectations for speed, transparency, and defensibility continue to rise, even as teams operate under persistent resource constraints. The pressures that shaped 2025 have not eased, and organizations across sectors are increasingly asked to deliver timely, trustworthy evidence in complex and fast-moving environments.
What the past year reinforced is the importance of measured progress. Advances in tools and automation matter, but only when they are grounded in methodological rigor, clear oversight, and sustained trust in the evidence produced. Experience across the field has shown that speed alone is insufficient if confidence is compromised, just as rigor alone is no longer sustainable if workflows cannot keep pace with real-world decision timelines.
Looking ahead, the most durable approaches to evidence synthesis will be those that preserve human accountability while using technology to help teams manage scale responsibly. PICO Portal enters 2026 guided by these lessons, focused on supporting evidence teams with workflows that are practical, defensible, and aligned with the realities of modern evidence work.
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