Systematic Reviews

This paper is a guide to the rationale and nature of systematic reviews and will provide a background to understanding their use in clinical practice.

Series of articles in the Annals of Internal medicine covering methodological challenges in conducting systematic reviews in particular subjects:
Therapeutic Devices & Procedures
Assessment of Treatment Harms
Diagnostic Techniques
Complementary & Alternative Medicine
Educational Interventions
Economic Analyses
Drug Efficacy or Effectiveness
Health Care Delivery, Organization, or Finance

"A clear understanding of the process will provide clinicians with the tools to judiciously appraise reviews and interpret them. We hope that it will enable clinicians to conduct systematic reviews, generate high-quality evidence, and contribute to the evidence-based medicine movement."

Part of a tutorial article series on Evidence Based Medicine, Randomized Controlled Trials, Systematic Reviews, and putting Evidence into Practice. (PDF has all four articles).

This article reviews the basic principles of meta-analysis, discusses its potential weaknesses such as heterogeneity and publication bias, and highlights special situations when dealing with surgical trials.

In this paper we define and distinguish current terms, point out important resources for systematic reviews, describe the impact of systematic review on the quality of primary studies and summaries of the evidence, and provide perspectives on the promise of systematic reviews for shaping the agenda for public health research.

This paper aims to assist in the reading of a systematic review.

Online collaboration space for librarians.

JBI offers classes on systematic reviews and books on evidence synthesis.

An evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The PRISMA Statement consists of a 27-item checklist and a four-phase flow diagram.

The PRISMA for Abstracts checklist gives authors a framework for condensing their systematic review into the essentials for an abstract that will meet the needs of many readers.

Intended to improve the reporting of parallel-group randomized controlled trial (RCT), enabling readers to understand a trial's design, conduct, analysis and interpretation, and to assess the validity of its results. It contains a freely available checklist and flow diagram.

Standards for the reporting of new Cochrane Intervention Reviews. "The Cochrane Collaboration has adopted recommendations provided in the PRISMA statement. We believe the reporting standards [here] will ensure compliance with these recommendations."

The proposed checklist contains specifications for reporting of metaanalyses of observational studies in epidemiology, including background, search strategy, methods, results, discussion, and conclusion.

The STARD statement consist of a checklist of 25 items and recommends the use of a flow diagram which describe the design of the study and the flow of patients. Intended to improve the accuracy and completeness of reporting of studies of diagnostic accuracy, to allow readers to assess the potential for bias in the study and to evaluate its generalisability.

The mnemonic STARLITE (sampling strategy, type of study, approaches, range of years, limits, inclusion and exclusions, terms used, electronic sources) may be used to convey the essential elements for reporting literature searches.