Research Guides: Systematic Reviews: Managing and Appraising Results

Managing Citations

When conducting a systematic review, a team can be dealing with thousands of citations to review. There are several citation management tools, some free and some fee-based, to help facilitate reviewing and sharing notes on these articles. Librarians at the Biomedical Library can discuss with you the benefits of some common citation management tools:

EndNote Desktop (available from Software Central or the ASUCLA Store)
EndNote Web
Zotero
Mendeley

Appraising the Evidence

GRADE Handbook
GRADE (Grading Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) is a working group of health care professionals (methodologists, clinicians, guideline developers and research) who are standardizing the reviewing of evidence. The GRADE Handbook describes the approach for evaluating the quality of best available evidence.
AMSTAR2
AMSTAR (A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews) is a series of questions that will readers of the literature evaluate the quality of an article and its relevance to their research question.
CASP
CASP (Critical Appraisals Skills Programme) Checklists offer a combination of checklist and narrative discussion for reviewing eight different types of literature.
JAMA's Users' Guide to the Medical Literature
JAMA regularly publishes articles about how to read and evaluate literature. For groups who haven't reviewed literature critically before, this is a good series of articles to learn about critical appraisal of the literature
JBI SUMARI
JBI SUMARI is a web-based application designed to assist researchers and practitioners in fields such as health, social sciences and humanities. JBI SUMARI can support the conduct of 10 different types of systematic reviews including reviews of effectiveness, qualitative research, economic evaluations, prevalence/incidence, etiology/risk, mixed methods, umbrella/overviews, text/opinion, diagnostic test accuracy and scoping reviews. Click on the EBP Tools link on the top of the page to create an account in SUMARI.