Here are some guidelines for approaching and writing a systematic review:
Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews: https://training.cochrane.org/handbook
This is a good overview for systematic reviews. I’d suggest you take a look to get a sense of how to tackle this type of paper
PROSPERO: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/
It’s a good idea for you to register your review with PROSPERO – 1) You can see if anyone has registered a review with the same topic; 2) The protocol template they ask you to fill out provides a good starting point for how you can frame your paper, and encourages you to answer preliminary questions that are important for starting your review
PICO strategy (template attached)
You can follow this outline as well to help develop your protocol
General steps:
Establish your protocol
Establish your search strategy
Key words and search string you will use to find articles
Inclusion/Exclusion criteria
A set of criteria you will use to determine the types of articles you plan to include/exclude
Databases (e.g., OVID/Medline, Pubmed)
Screening – Ensure you have at least two reviewers (e.g., yourself + another person) and you will be screening based on your inclusion/exclusion criteria
Title and abstract – In this step, you will be reviewing the title + abstract only from the results of your search. Based on the papers you include from this step, you will move onto the full-text screening
Full-text screening – In this step, you will be reviewing each full-text article to ensure it meets your criteria. If it does not, exclude the study
Record the number of articles you include from each step and reasons for exclusion. This will be a helpful step for when you create your PRISMA diagram (http://www.prisma-statement.org/)
Covidence is a good tool! https://www.covidence.org/
Data extraction
Once you’ve selected your articles for inclusion, you will want to establish a set of metrics/data points/information you would like to extract for your manuscript. This table can also serve as a summary of study characteristics and outcomes
Quality assessment
Manuscript preparation
In this step, you will want to prepare your manuscript (introduction, methods, results, discussion, limitation and conclusions). Please share your manuscript with me so I can take a look at it before we circulate.
Introduction – Serve as background information, rationale, significance and objective
Methods – Essentially the entirety of step 3
Results – Summary of your findings
Discussion – Main highlight + literature
Limitations
Conclusions
Here are some links to help you understand the search strategy a bit better:
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=713309&p=5084292
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/comprehensivesearching
https://guides.library.utoronto.ca/c.php?g=577919&p=4120729
Please cc me at each stage so I can monitor your progress. Feel free to reach out if any other questions.
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