Systematic Reviews: Home

If you are considering a systematic review project, you should first consider its purpose.

• A systematic review is useful for investigating a well-defined problem for which there exist several large clinical trials that follow quantitative research methods. Your analytical review will summarize the results of trials, analyze and combine the effect estimates reported in several studies, and provide cumulative evidence about the efficacy of one specific intervention/treatment/dose.
• If you are investigating a less well understood problem for which there are few trials and/or you are reviewing observational data/qualitative research, a scoping or narrative literature review is more appropriate

When writing up the results of your systematic review for publication in a journal article for a wider professional audience, you will need to include more detail about the methods you followed and the decisions you made on what studies to include/exclude from your review of the medical literature. To do this, you can follow the PRISMA guidelines, a checklist of items to report. 

Current PRISMA guidelines:

Source: Kysh, L. (2013). What's in a name? The difference between a systematic review and a literature review and why it matters. University of Southern California, Norris Medical Library. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.766364

Are you currently working on a systematic review or research project and need assistance with search strategies and literature reviews? Himmelfarb Reference Librarians are skilled researchers who are trained to assist you with your review. This JAMA article extols the benefits of using a medical librarian to improve the quality of a systematic review of the medical literature.

We can:

• Identify search terms & expert search strategies
• Select key databases and grey literature resources
• Assist in finding relevant articles
• Upload the search results into Covidence
• Help in writing the methodology section of the review

The guide below provides more information regarding these services. Contact the Reference and Instruction department at himmelfarb@gwu.edu or 202-994-2962 to set up an appointment.

Covidence is an online tool that streamlines the systematic review process. It makes it easy to screen references and extract data. You can also divide up the work among your team, and track the progress of the project.