Abstract
With the rapid growth of biomedical literature, there is increasing need to make meaningful
inferences from a comprehensive and complex body of evidence. Systematic reviews with
or without meta-analyses offer an objective and summative approach to synthesize knowledge
and critically appraise evidence to inform clinical practice. Systematic reviews also
help identify key knowledge gaps for future investigation. In this review, the authors
provide a step-by-step approach to conducting a systematic review. These include:
(1) formulating a focused and clinically-relevant question; (2) designing a detailed
review protocol with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria; (3) performing a systematic
literature search of multiple databases and unpublished data, in consultation with
a medical librarian, to identify relevant studies; (4) meticulous data abstraction
by at least two sets of investigators independently; (5) assessing risk of bias in
individual studies; (6) quantitative synthesis with meta-analysis; and (7) critically
and transparently ascertaining quality of evidence.
Keywords
knowledge synthesis - evidence-based medicine - pooled analysis
