Learn more about the different kinds of reviews and how to conduct them with this playlist from UT Austin.
Systematic Review Training
The South Central Region regional medical library of the Network of the National Library of Medicine partnered with a systematic review national expert and leader, Margaret Foster, Associate Professor and Systematic Reviews and Research Coordinator at the Texas A&M University Medical Sciences Library with a joint position at the School of Public Health. From this partnership is a systematic review training series.
Sessions have been archived on YouTube.
The National Academy of Medicine, the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality each recommend securing the services of a librarian to plan strategically effective and comprehensive searches:
Levels of Research Evidence
Systematic reviews are considered the highest form of evidence as they are an accumulation of research on one topic. Cochrane Systematic Reviews are considered the most rigorous systematic reviews being done.
Features | Narrative Literature Review | Systematic Literature Review |
Question | Broad | Narrow |
Source | Not usually specified, potentially biased | Comprehensive sources and search approach explicitly specified |
Selection | Not usually specified, potentially biased | Uniformly applied preselected inclusion/exclusion criteria |
Evaluation | Variable | Rigorous critical evaluation |
Synthesis | Often qualitative, quantitative through meta-analysis* | Often qualitative, quantitative through meta-analysis* |
Steps for a Systematic Review
Recommended Guidelines
Green, S., & Higgins, J. P. T. (editors). (2011). Chapter 2: Preparing a Cochrane review. In J. P. T. Higgins, & S. Green (Eds.). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions (Version 5.1.0). Available from http://handbook.cochrane.org
Meta-Analysis. (2008). In W. A. Darity, Jr. (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd ed., Vol. 5, pp. 104-105). Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA.
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