Systematic Review

Last updated on Jul 14, 2021

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).

Related terms: <a href='/glossary/meta-analysis/'>Meta-analysis</a>, CONSORT, Non-Intervention, Reproducible, and Open Systematic Reviews (NIRO-SR), PRISMA

References: Higgins et al. (2019), Moher et al. (2009), Page et al. (2021), & Topor et al. (2021)

Drafted and Reviewed by: Jade Pickering, Mahmoud Elsherif, Adam Parker, Charlotte R. Pennington, Timo Roettger, Marta Topor, Emily A. Williams, FlĂĄvio Azevedo

Note that we are currently working on an automated mechanism to link references cited above with their full-length version that can be found at https://forrt.org/glossary/references with all references used so far.