Systematic Reviews

Working on a systematic review? Librarians at the UCLA Biomedical Library can help you! The UCLA Biomedical Library offers a systematic review service to research staff, graduate students and faculty. To initiate a consultation about your systematic review click through to our Health Sciences Expert Searching portal. If you're unsure whether or not your research fits the systematic review methodology, use the Cornell University Library's Decision Tree to help you decide.

Our service offers guidance and collaboration in the following areas:

• Choosing the best review methodology to fit your timeline, question, and discipline
• Selecting search terms, databases, and expert search strategies
• Developing and delivering finalized search strategies
• Organizing search results using citation management (EndNote)
• Writing the methodology section

Staff availability will determine if UCLA librarians will consult on a project or be full partners on the project.

A systematic review is fundamentally different from a traditional narrative review. For more information, see Types of Literature Reviews.

A systematic review is defined as: "A scientific investigation that focuses on a specific question and that uses explicit, planned scientific methods to identify, select, assess, and summarize the findings of similar but separate studies. It may or may not include a quantitative synthesis of the results from separate studies (meta-analysis) depending on the available data." IOM p 1.

According to the Cochrane Handbook, section 1.2.2, "the key characteristics of a systematic review are:

• a clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies;
• an explicit, reproducible methodology;
• a systematic search that attempts to identify all studies that would meet the eligibility criteria;
• an assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies, for example through the assessment of risk of bias; and
• a systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies."

Green S, Higgins JPT, Alderson P, Clarke M, Mulrow CD, Oxman AD. Chapter 1: Introduction. In: Higgins JPT, Green S (editors), Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0 (updated March 2011). The Cochrane Collaboration, 2011. Available from www.cochrane-handbook.org.

Did you know that there is a specific methodology for systematic reviews? A systematic review requires…

• More than one screener
• Extensive search strategies utilizing both controlled vocabulary terms and keywords
• Searching multiple databases
• Establishing inclusion/exclusion criteria prior to searching
• For more information, read the Institute of Medicine's Standards for Systematic Reviews

You can also use this primer geared towards beginners for a better understanding of the differences between types of reviews and the overall steps of a systematic review:

• Craig A. Umscheid; A Primer on Performing Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Volume 57, Issue 5, 1 September 2013, Pages 725–734, https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/cit333