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Systematic Reviews

This guide provides a step-by-step breakdown of how to conduct a systematic review and how librarians can assist in the process.

Timeline

Time estimates vary widely for the completion of a systematic review, but most estimates say that a systematic review takes 6-12 months to complete. Ultimately it will depend largely on the size of your team, the time available to put towards the project, the state of the current literature on your research topic, and your expertise with systematic searching. To get an estimate of how long your review might take, use the PredicTER tool linked below.

Systematic Review Team Development

Primary Investigator/Team Leader

  • Responsible for overseeing the project
  • Ensuring the protocol is followed
  • Assigns tasks and timelines
  • Corresponds with librarian

Subject Specialist

  • Provides applicable vocabulary for search terms
  • Assists with gathering exemplar articles
  • Provides insight into the topic
  • May also participate in PI role and/or screening process

Screeners

  • Two screeners are required for a valid review
  • A third screener may be necessary to break ties
  • The PI and/or Subject Specialist may also screen

Librarian

  • Assists with search term and strategy development
  • Assists with choosing the appropriate databases
  • Assists with grey literature sources
  • Assists with publication questions

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A systematic review requires minimum of 2 people, not including the librarian, to complete. 3 or more team members is recommended to help resolve disputes during the screening phase, and to help reduce the individual workload of each team member. 

Citation Managers

Citation managers - also called reference managers or bibliographic management software - are programs that store and format scholarly references and citations. They are useful for keeping track of important articles or other works, for formatting citations correctly using a wide variety of citation styles including APA and AMA, and sometimes for sharing research between a group of users. 

Most will allow you to :

  • Store your selected citations and even articles
  • Create correctly formatted lists of citations in a variety of styles 
  • Double-check to be sure of formatting
  • Take notes on or about saved articles
  • Share your selected citations and articles with others

Avoid Repetition of Recently Published Reviews of the Same Topic

During the planning stage, it is recommended that the team searches for existing systematic and scoping reviews on related topics. This helps to ensure that you are not duplicating an existing review (a review older than 10 years old can be updated), and can also be used to help inform the search strategy and inclusion/exclusion criteria you can use in your own review. Related reviews can help you generate search terms and identify databases and journals of relevance to your topic. In addition, viewing the citations of those reviews might help you identify relevant research.

Many databases include search filters or limiters that will limit your search to just systematic reviews. If that is not available, searching for the phrase "systematic review"  and "scoping review" in the title of your search results will also work.

It is recommended to search Open Science Framework (OSF) for your topic to make sure it hasn't been registered by another researcher. OSF is where many academics register their protocols (their intent to research a topic) and so searching in OSF informs you of what research is ongoing and may not have been published yet. It's just another way to make sure you are not duplicating an existing review. Below is a video on how to search for your topic in OSF.

Partner with a Librarian

All guidelines governing the creation of systematic reviews recommend the involvement of a librarian or information professional on your systematic review team.  We recommend you work with a librarian during the planning and searching phase of your systematic review. 

 

Partnering with a librarian

  • Saves researchers time
  • Ensure a comprehensive and rigorous search
  • Gets maximum retrieval of relevant articles
  • Minimizes article screening time by excluding non-relevant articles from the search strategy

Guideline

The PRISMA-ScR guidelines are a set of requirements for how you write the final report on your scoping review. Reporting according to PRISMA-ScR is required for a high-quality scoping review and is required by many publishers. Familiarizing yourself with the requirements early on in the project can help ensure that you keep track of all the required information and make the writing process smoother. Scoping reviews are reported according to PRISMA-ScR, an extension of the original PRISMA guidelines, which were explicitly developed for systematic reviews.

Systematic Reviews are CONDUCTED according to the Cochrane or JBI Guidelines.

  • They are REPORTED according to the PRISMA standards.
  • These two processes must be documented within your methodology section.