Why systematic reviews are important

There are several specialist systematic review organizations; so what should you look for when selecting an organization to work with? Many first time reviewers, whether they are independent researchers or undertaking the review as part of a PhD or Professional Doctorate, feel that they benefit from attending workshops and accessing online training resources offered by some review organizations.

You will want the organization be up to date with good reporting practice, and to ensure that their guidance, handbooks and style guides help you to achieve these standards. As a researcher, you will probably want the opportunity to communicate and exchange ideas with people from a broad range of disciplines, and some review organizations provide seminars, conferences and online discussion rooms so creating a hub for a community. This kind of networking can be instrumental in acquiring the diverse skill mix required of coauthors to produce a well-researched and relevant review.

The perspectives of those involved in the care for people with cardiovascular disease can be different to those of other health care professionals. As such the organization you choose to work with, or your own team or reviewers, should have strong input from relevant groups with appropriate expertise that can provide you with peer review and team members in order to achieve your review. Finally, one of your major goals will be to publish your findings, so look for an organization that will help you publish and make your review accessible to the public and professionals all over the world — perhaps without expensive journal registration fees.

As part of the publishing process, you should expect peer review, copy editor support and the database or journal to be rated as of international standard. A summary of what support a nonexhaustive selection of organizations can provide for your review is given in Table 2. More information on each can be found at. They serve as a public repository of data and have a searchable archive of key questions addressed by systematic reviews.

Data extraction is also often independently performed by two authors with disagreements being solved by arbitration and discussion. It is crucial to predefine criteria for study selection and data analysis to ensure transparency and reproducibility while generating an effective and meaningful systematic review.

Next, data is collected from studies meeting the review criteria, to include information on PICOS characteristics, outcome data and risk of bias assessments. Risk of bias assessment should be done, when possible, using a predetermined, validated tool or equivalent for qualitative studies if included 9.

Bias is a systematic deviation from the truth; it may overestimate or underestimate the true effect, and it may be large or small. Do you have the time that it takes to properly conduct a systematic review? Can you afford to have articles in languages other than English translated? You should include all relevant studies in your systematic review, regardless of the language they were published in, so as to avoid language bias.

If your project does not meet the above criteria, there are many more options for conducting a synthesis of the literature. The chart below highlights several review methodologies. A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies. Health Info Libr J. Dahlgren Memorial Library. Search this Guide Search. Should I do a systematic review? Guides and Standards The Cochrane Handbook The Cochrane Handbook has become the de facto standard for planning and carrying out a systematic review.

Chapter 6, Searching for Studies, is most helpful in planning your review. They address the entire systematic review process, from locating, screening, and selecting studies for the review, to synthesizing the findings including meta-analysis and assessing the overall quality of the body of evidence, to producing the final review report.

A item checklist, PRISMA focuses on randomized trials but can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions. What is a systematic review?

When to use systematic review methodology Systematic reviews require more time and manpower than traditional literature reviews. Before beginning a systematic review, researchers should address these questions: Is there is enough literature published on the topic to warrant a review?

Can your research question be answered by a systematic review? Do you have a protocol outlining the review plan? Do you have a team of experts? Systematic reviews typically take months. Do you have a method for discerning bias? Which review is right for you? Goes beyond mere description to include degree of analysis and conceptual innovation. Typically results in hypothesis or model. Seeks to identify significant items in the field. No formal quality assessment. Attempts to evaluate according to contribution.

Typically narrative, perhaps conceptual or chronological. Meta-Analysis: Analysis of the effects of a given intervention or exposure more accurately than each study individually. Care should be taken in the preparation of the meta-analysis, since the methods of evaluating the results should be sufficiently similar so that we can group and compare them.

Given the information provided in this letter, we hope that the articles of systematic reviews published in this journal are of quality and of fundamental importance and help for decision making for clinical practice in health. Conflict of interest We declare that there is no conflict of interest. Journal of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Diseases 1 1. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Journal Menu. This is hardly surprising when one considers that there are over 20, biomedical journals which contain over two million articles each year 1. These articles vary greatly in quality and often are not well indexed. Practitioners involved in patient care rarely have the time, resources and skills to gather together and critically appraise relevant research in an effort to inform their practice.

Nurse Researcher.