Systematic Reviews & Evidence Synthesis

Have you been inspired (or told) to do a systematic review? Let's make sure a systematic review is right for you!

What is a Systematic Review?

The specific guidelines for how to conduct a systematic review differ by field of study, but the core process is generally the same.

1. Scope and develop a focused research question (pre-planning phase)
2. Write a protocol for the conduct of the project and register it publicly
3. Develop and conduct a comprehensive and systematic search of the literature
4. Screen all results of that search using predetermined inclusion/exclusion criteria
5. Extract the relevant data from the research/articles that passed through the screening process
6. Appraise the quality of the research/articles you selected
7. Analyze and synthesize the data as appropriate to the data type (quantitative/qualitative/mixed)
8. Write and publish the review

What is the Goal & Why Does it Matter?

The goal of a systematic review is to provide a clear, evidence based recommendation for practice or policy in a very specific situation based on the existing evidence and its quality.

Systematic reviews have a narrow focus but search comprehensively across a large body of literature to answer that narrow question.

If this is not an appropriate goal for your thesis/capstone/dissertation, then there are other review types that may be better suited.

Overall, identify your research question first, and then determine if a systematic review or other evidence synthesis method is appropriate for that question!

Do You Have a Research Team?

A research team is an essential component for systematic reviews and almost all other evidence synthesis projects. This can be a challenge for graduate students! Figure out if you have a team to work with before getting too far into these projects.

If you do not have a research team, you can:

• use a different term (see below) to refer to your project,
• conduct a pilot project version of a systematic review,
• conduct a critically appraised topic review
• conduct a high-quality traditional literature review.

Scope and Viability

At the start of this process, it is almost impossible to be certain how many included studies you will ultimately have in your project. Make sure you have the time and capacity to deal with a high volume of results and a plan B if there is nothing.

You can help yourself mitigate some of these risks:

• conduct extensive exploratory searching to locate "seed" articles that you think will make it though your inclusion criteria
• make certain there are no existing published or planned systematic reviews on your research question
• test your inclusion/exclusion criteria against a sample set of search results to make certain they function well for identifying an appropriate results set for your research goals
• write an thorough and clear protocol outlining exactly what you will do, why you are doing it, how it will be done, who will be involved in what capacity, and which software you will use during this process

For any publication purposes (article, poster, conference presentation, etc.), many projects that do not have research teams or do not have resources to follow the full methodological guidelines are best described as:

• Structured Literature Review
• Systematized (Scoping/Integrative) Review
• Comprehensive Review
• Systematized Search and Review
• Pilot Systematic/Scoping/Integrative Review

These titles adjustments acknowledge that the authors recognize the proper methods, goals, and guidelines for conduct of systematic reviews and other types of evidence synthesis projects. These methods were used wherever possible, but the resources were not available to meet full methodological guidelines.

Alternatively, there are a few evidence synthesis project types that can be produced on short timelines and/or without a full research team. Check out the Types of Reviews page.