An Introduction to Systematic Reviews
Shakila Thangaratinam
Professor of Maternal and Perinatal Health
Women’s Health Research Unit
R & D Director of Women’s Health
Barts Health NHS Trust
Systematic review
• What is it?
Traditional reviews
• Search and acquisition of evidence not clear
• Personal interests of the authors
• Reliability issues
What is a systematic review?
• Systematic undertaking of a review with
a focused research question that tries to
identify, appraise, select and synthesise all high
quality research evidence relevant to that
question.
Systematic reviews
• What is it?
• Why do we need it?
Why do we need Systematic
reviews
New evidence changes patient management
Delay in implementation can harm patient.
It is difficult to get evidence when it is needed
Knowledge and clinical performance deteriorates
with time without an attempt to keep up-to-date
• Traditional continuing education programs do not
improve clinical performance
• EBM keeps its practitioners up-to date
•
•
•
•
Why do systematic reviews?
•
•
•
•
•
Support Evidence Based Practice
Research
Inform clinical policy
Publication
Personal professional development
Systematic reviews
Review of reviews
No
Yes
Good
quality
reviews
Poor
quality
reviews
Survey
of
practice
Primary
studies
Yes
No
Conduct Systematic
reviews
Good quality study
EBM
Poor quality study
Design and
conduct primary
study
Systematic reviews
• What is it?
• Why do we need it?
• How to do them?
How to do systematic reviews?




Formulate clear clinical questions from our knowledge
needs
Search the literature to identify relevant articles
Critically appraise the evidence for its validity and
usefulness
Synthesise evidence
Workshop Objectives
• Aim: Familiarisation with Systematic
reviews
• Objectives:
– Literature Retrieval
– Critical Appraisal of:
• Therapy and Diagnosis
• Primary studies and Systematic Reviews
– Use of clinically meaningful statistics
The systematic review process
Formulate
research
question
Further selection of
primary studies
using inclusion
criteria
Extract data
Design
search
strategy
Search
bibliographic
databases
Retrieve papers
Identify possible
papers from
titles/abstracts
Quality
appraisal
Synthesis
Formulate research /
policy conclusions