Systematic Reviews: Pre-Review

1. Develop and Refine your Research Question
2. Determine if a systematic review is needed on your topic.
3. Form your Research Team
4. Decide what citation management and systematic review software you will use

Usually, there will be a minimum of 3 team members for a systematic review. 

A team of up to ten or twelve people is not unusual for a large systematic review. 

Choose experts in the field and conscientiously create a diverse team to ensure different voices and perspectives are represented. Define each reviewers roles early in the process to limit confusion and conflict. 

Collaborate with a librarian to create a search strategy,

Citation Management Software

• Zotero - free to use
  • While citation managers are not required, they can assist with organizing citations and screening levels, deduplication, and finding PDFs of articles for full text screening.

Systematic Review Software

• Rayyan - offers a free membership
• Abstrackr - upload and organize the results of a literature search for a systematic review. It also makes it possible for your team to screen, organize, and manipulate all of your abstracts in one place. 

Systematic Reviews aim to answer a specific research question. There are many frameworks that can help develop a research question. One of the most popular in healthcare is PICO.

Additional variations of PICO include:

(PICOT, PICOS, PICOTS, PICOTTS)

• Timeframe
• Type of study
• Setting

Also know as eligibility criteria, researchers should aim to reduce bias by determining what to include and exclude in their systematic review. This criteria should be determined after creating the research question but before beginning a literature search.

Possible Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria:

• Type of participants: May be limited to specific groups of people or age ranges
• Study design: May include specific study designs and exclude others based on which best answer the research question
• Intervention of interest: Includes interventions of interest and excludes any others
• Outcomes of interest: Includes outcomes of interest and may exclude studies reporting outcomes not of interest
• Setting: May be limited to a specific setting like inpatient, ambulatory, classroom, etc.
• Type of publication: Reviews, editorials, commentaries, and letters are often excluded
• Date of publication: Date ranges may be applied when updating a systematic review or when specific to an intervention or therapy i.e. last 10 years
• Language of publication: Non-English articles are often excluded from reviews; however, this may allow language bias to affect the quality of your review

Can't find the full text?

ASK US! 

Request an article or book .

You can also Ask a Librarian about visiting one of our partner libraries.