Systematic Literature Review : A Practical Guide

Master the five-step process of systematic reviews, from framing questions with pico/peo/spider to identifying relevant literature. Proceed to appraisal, synthesis, and evaluating applicability and heterogeneity for evidence-based conclusions.

Compare traditional and systematic reviews, exploring critical, conceptual, state-of-the-art, scoping, and narrative reviews. Learn to formulate review questions, develop protocols, and grasp registration for systematic evidence synthesis.

Develop a systematic review protocol by outlining the review question, rationale, and planned methods before starting to minimize bias and guide how studies are located, appraised, and synthesized.

Explore the four main sections of a systematic review protocol: background, methods, process, and timetable, and learn to craft search strategies, selection criteria, quality assessment, data extraction, and dissemination plans.

Register and document your review protocol as a reproducible, stage-by-stage plan, with mandatory and optional fields, through organizations like Cochrane Collaboration, Campbell Collaboration, Joanna Briggs Institute, BMC collaboration, and Prospero.

Select a topic area for your systematic review based on interest or professional practice, then narrow it to a precise review question using the inverted triangle.

Identify and distinguish the main types of review questions, from open to closed, and explore six categories: treatment, prevention, diagnosis, prognosis, causation, and patients experience and attitude.

Formulate a comprehensive review question by detailing population, intervention or exposure, comparator, and outcome using PICO or PTO frameworks. Separate the question into parts for clear focus.

Master the Pico framework by identifying population, intervention, comparison, and outcome, then design four-row questions to structure review topics.

Apply the PEO framework to craft qualitative review questions by defining patient exposure and outcome, arranged in a three-row table, with examples of bullying and lead exposure.

Apply the spider framework to frame qualitative and mixed methods review questions. Define sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, and research type with antenatal education experiences as an example.

Clarify the preliminary problem statement, review question, and aims and objectives to align them and avoid mistakes, with examples guiding refinement of the review protocol and literature search.

Conduct a structured, transparent search to identify all relevant studies for a systematic review, balancing sensitivity and specificity with keywords, multiple databases, and consideration of study designs and unpublished data.

Master boolean operators to refine systematic literature searches by using and, or, not, proximity, phrase, and wildcards, and apply nesting and exclusion to target precise results.

Learn to define inclusion and exclusion criteria with transparency to bound systematic reviews, conduct scoping searches, and document dates, populations, settings, study designs, screening and synthesis.

The grade framework offers a transparent method to rate the quality of evidence in systematic reviews and guidelines, detailing downgrading factors like bias, inconsistency, and imprecision.

Identify themes in literature through a classification mechanism within a systematic review, then use frequency and gap analysis to reveal parenting styles and aggression across developed, developing, underdeveloped country contexts.

Explain how diagrams, a review matrix, and summary tables organize qualitative information; describe flow diagrams, forest plots, and funnel plots under fixed and random effects, with specimen tables showing results.

Present review findings tables with a specimen template, document search date, hits, discarded items, remaining articles, and inclusion criteria applied to abstracts and titles.

Collaborate to publish together through research collaboration and networking, drawing on a social sciences focus in management, child development, marketing, information systems, and HR.

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