Systematic Review

Definition: A form of literature review and evidence synthesis . A systematic review will usually include a thorough, repeatable (reproducible) search strategy including key terms and databases in order to find relevant literature on a given topic or research question. Systematic reviewers follow a process of screening the papers found through their search, until they have filtered down to a set of papers that fit their predefined inclusion criteria. These papers can then be synthesised in a written review which may optionally include statistical synthesis in the form of a meta-analysis as well. A systematic review should follow a standard set of guidelines to ensure that bias is kept to a minimum for example PRISMA (Moher et al., 2009; Page et al., 2021) , Cochrane Systematic Reviews (Higgins et al., 2019), or NIRO-SR (Topor et al., 2021).