Once you have determined that the systematic review is the appropriate method for your topic and gathered your team - you are ready to begin.
As a reminder - Systematic reviews require a team and it is important to include the right people. It is recommended that teams include:
Individuals can fill more than one role, however, one person cannot fill all roles --> remember it takes a team!
The main component of this initial part is to clearly define your research question. This is essential to developing and gathering terms. It can be helpful to formulate your topic using PICO(TT). This framework can help you develop a specific and answerable clinical question.
| PICO Format | Definition & Questions to Consider |
| P | Patient, Population, or Problem What are the characteristics of the patient or population? What is the condition or disease in which you are interested? |
| I | Intervention or Exposure What do you want to do with this patient (e.g. treat, diagnose, observe)? |
| C | Comparison or Intervention (if appropriate) What is the alternative to the intervention (e.g., placebo, different drug, surgery)? |
| O | Outcome What are the relevant outcomes (e.g., morbidity, death, complications)? |
| T | Type of Clinical Question Diagnosis, Etiology/Harm, Therapy, Prognosis, Prevention |
| T | Type of Study Design to Answer the Question What would be the best study design/methodology (systematic review, RCT, cohort study, case control, etc.) |
Of course PICO(TT) is not suitable for all research questions. Other frameworks include:
If there is already a review on your topic, it may prove difficult to get your systematic review published. If a review already exists on the topic, ask how does your review add to or differ from these existing reviews. Explore the resources below to determine the existence of current reviews:
Common categories:
Gold standard articles (GSAs) are those ideal types of studies that you want to include in your review. Gather 3 to 10 of these articles - you will use these to help determine your keywords and controlled vocabulary.
Remember these articles need to adhere to your inclusion/exclusion criteria.
Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews considers CENTRAL, MEDLINE, and Embase as three of the most important databases to use in your review. Although many databases overlap in content, you need to search multiple databases to be as comprehensive as possible. Make sure to choose databases that are appropriate to your topic. Commonly used databases include:
CINAHL Plus with Full Text provides indexing for 3,024 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health, with indexing back to 1937. CINAHL Plus with Full Text also contains searchable cited references for more than 1,160 journals and provides full text for hundreds of journals, plus legal cases, clinical innovations, critical paths, drug records, research instruments and clinical trials. PDF backfiles to 1937 are also included.
Coverage: 1937 - present
MEDLINE with full text (EBSCO) is a comprehensive source of full text for medical journals, providing full text for more than 1,370 journals indexed in MEDLINE. Of those, more than 1,340 have cover-to-cover indexing in MEDLINE. This wide-ranging file contains full text for many of the most used journals in the MEDLINE index - with no embargo. MEDLINE with Full Text is the definitive research tool for medical literature. Coverage: Full Text: 1965-present/ Citations:1800s-present
PsycINFO, produced by the American Psychological Association, is a collection of electronically stored bibliographic references--most with abstracts or content summaries. It contains citations that PsycINFO has created in electronic form. Although the references themselves are all written in English, the covered literature includes material published in over 45 countries and written in 30 languages.Coverage: 1872-present
A comprehensive, multidisciplinary abstract and citation database that includes literature from the social sciences, physical sciences, health sciences and life sciences. Search and filter relevant information, monitor research trends, track newly published research and identify subject experts. Use the analytics tools to visualize, compare and export the data.
Search the world’s leading scholarly journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities and navigate the full citation network.
By creating and registering a protocol, you are setting out guidelines, reducing bias, and increasing transparency and reproducibility. There are many options for where to register your protocol:
