Doing a Systematic Review

Doing a Systematic Review

Doing a systematic review

WISER session: 1 March 2006

INTRO

Systematic Reviews in medicine have quite a long history now ie 15yrs-20. They are all part of the growth of Evidence Based Medicine and greater awareness of the need to apply quality research to practice. This has been a growing trend since the 1970’s and early 80’s when there was a lot of concern expressed about bias and errors in reviews of research. In the 1980s various people drew attention to the poor scientific quality of healthcare review articles and by the late 80’s and early 90’s Archie Cochrane had successfully worked to bring about the Oxford Database of Perinatal Trials and by 1992b had opened the Cochrane Centre in Oxford to facilitate the preparation of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials of health care.

By 1995 the Cochrane database of Systematic Reviews was launched and by 1996 the Cochrane Library on CD-ROM and disk was born.

After that very potted history I will hand you over to Jo who will get to the meat of “Doing a systematic review.”

Summing UP

Jo has pointed out the various steps that are important in doing a Systematic review.

The Most important to keep in mind are:

  1. Systematic reviews are time consuming. So don’t think you can do a good review of the literature in a couple of days while writing up your thesis.CRD- Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at York estimate a medical review takes between 9-24 months and this is when it is done by a team of people.
  2. Systematic Reviews need planning. Scope out your work and try various protocols before embarking on your final approach.
  3. Document all the steps you carry out so that they are reproducible and all members of team know the ground rules.. Make sure you make it clear where, when, what and how you searched for information.
  4. Make sure you have learnt how to use a Reference Management System. The University has site licences to ENDNOTE and REFERENCE MANAGER and maybe even Procite and it is almost impossible to review systematically without a good searchable reference database of your search results. OUCS runs courses on these packages.
  5. Make sure you set your criteria for inclusion before analysing the literature. Be rigorous in applying your criteria. (Make sure you know why you rejected or included your external examiners papers in your review!)
  6. Use a standard method to critically appraise the articles.
  7. Be prepared to ask other researchers for clarification if you want to include there work in your meta-analysis.
  8. If Statistics are not your forte get some help from an expert early on in the process.
  9. Write down your methodology as you would with any scientific process when writing up your review/report so that it could be reproduced.
  10. SEEK OUT YOUR FRIENDLY LOCAL SUBJECT LIBRARIAN Finally as this is a session given by Librarians it would be unthinkable not to tell you that in Medicine it is normal practice to have an information specialist on the systematic review team. Your- Departmental/ RSL librarian will be only too pleased to offer you advice on resources and searching strategies and on retrieving the articles you need to include in your review. However it is to be noted that they can’t to do the review for you!
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