Systematic Reviews

Introduction

What is a Systematic Review?

The Cochrane Collaboration definition:

"A systematic review summarises the results of available carefully designed healthcare studies (controlled trials) and provides a high level of evidence on the effectiveness of healthcare interventions.  Judgments may be made about the evidence and inform recommendations for healthcare".
 

Characteristics of a systematic review 

• Clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies. 
• An explicit, reproducible methodology 
• A systematic search that attempts to identify all studies that would meet the eligibility criteria
• An assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies, for example through the assessment of risk of bias
• A systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies 

Key organisations that produce systematic reviews:

Cochrane Collaboration 
Cochrane Handbook 

JBI (Joanna Briggs Institution)
JBI Manual for evidence synthesis

Campbell Collaboration 
The Campbell Collaboration has a social science focus

Other types of review

High quality systematic reviews of complex questions can involve large teams of researchers and can take months or even years to complete. It is accepted good practice to have at least two researchers working on any systematic review to minimize bias in the selection of studies and the extraction of data. 

The time you have available and whether you are working on your own will impact on the level of review that you can complete. 

There are a range of other types of reviews including:

• ​Literature reviews
• Systematic literature reviews 
• Scoping reviews
• Rapid reviews

There is a useful summary of types of reviews from the PhD on Track web resource.  This also has links to further reading about review types.