NIRO began in January 2019 when Jade and Marta attended a talk by Professor Dorothy Bishop at the Advanced Methods for Reproducible Science Workshop in Cumberland Lodge, Windsor. We had both attempted systematic reviews before; Jade was part way through writing one for her PhD looking at differences in certain aspects of cognitive functioning between people with Parkinson’s and age-matched healthy controls, and Marta had completed one for her Masters looking at the effect of reward and punishment on motor control in healthy adults. We’d both found the process really difficult, mostly because the existing guidelines focused on writing reviews for interventions, particularly clinical trials in healthcare.

The three of us chatted about the current guidance, and decided that there was a gap to be filled. So we (Marta and Jade), with encouragement from Dorothy, embarked on this journey of creating our own guidelines for systematic reviews, as well as guidelines for assessing quality and risk of bias outside of interventional research settings. You can hear more about how the project got started and the progress we made on the ReproducibiliTea podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/reproducibilitea/episode-28-jade-pickering-and-marta-topor.

Following our initial meeting at Cumberland Lodge, the project was progressing slowly with ahandful of new collaborators or individuals interested in the project. This was until we (Jade and Oliver Clark with Marta joining via Skype) presented our ideas at the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science conference in Rotterdam, July 2019. Many more collaborators joined us following this meeting and through associated Tweets, and the attendees there helped shaped the project to become what it is today.

We have big plans for NIRO, and we're just getting started :)

- Marta and Jade