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Systematic Review: Your Question

This guide presents tools and advice for conducting systematic reviews.

Preparation Tasks

Developing a Research Question

As with any research, the first and most important decision in preparing a review is to determine its focus. This is best done by clearly framing the questions the review seeks to answer.

Good review questions often take time to develop, requiring engagement with not only the subject area, but with a wide group of stakeholders.

Well-formulated questions will guide many aspects of the review process, including determining eligibility criteria, searching for studies, collecting data from included studies, structuring the syntheses and presenting findings.

Systematic and other reviews will use a recognised framework to help them develop both their question and search strategy.

 

More Information

Existing Reviews

Once you have defined your question you can start the searching process. The first step in searching for studies is to locate previously conducted  reviews in your area of interest. This has three main purposes:

  1. To verify that your question hasn't already been answered;
  2. To verify that there are no other review protocols registered with researchers already looking at the same question;
  3. To identify related reviews that will need to be accessed so that you can review the reference lists for relevant primary studies.

 

Useful databases for identifying reviews

PRISMA Checklist

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)  is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. PRISMA primarily focuses on the reporting of reviews evaluating the effects of interventions, but can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews with objectives other than evaluating interventions (e.g. evaluating aetiology, prevalence, diagnosis or prognosis).


PRISMA for Searching

The PRISMA  extension for searching was published in 2021. The checklist includes 16 reporting items, each of which is detailed with exemplar reporting and Rationale.


PRISMA for Scoping Reviews

The PRISMA extension for scoping reviews checklist contains 20 essential reporting items and 2 optional items to include when completing a scoping review.