Systematic Reviews

How to conduct, report and maintain a Cochrane Review. Contains essential guidance for preparing and maintaining Cochrane Reviews of the effects of health interventions. Designed to be an accessible resource, the Handbook will also be of interest to anyone undertaking systematic reviews of interventions outside Cochrane, and many of the principles and methods presented are appropriate for systematic reviews addressing research questions other than effects of interventions. Contains extensive new material on systematic review methods addressing a wide-range of topics including network meta-analysis, equity, complex interventions, narrative synthesis, and automation. Also new to this edition, integrated throughout the Handbook, is the set of standards Cochrane expects its reviews to meet.

Provides a step-by-step guide to completing different types of literature reviews and syntheses, illuminated by examples from the literature. Focuses on synthesis of literature regarding research, quality improvement, clinical activities, health policy, and public media in separate chapters. Addresses data synthesis for quantitative, qualitative, and other literature review types.

Guides the reader on how to undertake high-quality literature reviews, from narrative reviews to protocol-driven reviews. The guidance covers a broad range of purposes, disciplines and research paradigms. Whether the literature review is part of a research project, doctoral study, dissertation or a stand-alone study, the book offers approaches, methods, tools, tips and guidelines to produce more effective literature reviews in an efficient manner. Attention given to presenting, reporting and publishing literature reviews.

Step-by-step approach to perform meta-analyses and interpret the results. All popularly used meta-analytic methods and models - such as the fixed effect model, random effects model, inverse variance heterogeneity model, and quality effect model - are used to find the confidence interval for the effect size measure of independent primary studies and the pooled study. In addition to the commonly used meta-analytic methods for various effect size measures, the book includes special topics such as meta-regression, dose-response meta-analysis, and publication bias.

This book provides conceptual information on the various processes involved in meta-analysis. It examines the importance of meta-analysis for the analyses of clinical data to draw a valid conclusion using suitable software. The initial sections of the book introduce meta-analysis, how to perform a systematic literature review (SLR), quality assessment of studies, extraction, and analysis of data. The subsequent section of the book contains information on advanced topics including, meta-regression, network meta-analysis, issues, mistakes, and future perspectives. In summary, the book provides a statistical method for combining the results of different studies on the same topic and resolving conflicts among studies. This book is written with the intent to allow a wide range of readers including students, researchers, and health care professionals, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and paramedical, and is also helpful for a beginner who would like to do a meta-analysis.

Covers the various steps involved in systematic reviews including development of a focused question and the strategy for conducting a comprehensive literature search, identifying studies addressing the underlying question, assessment of heterogeneity and the risk of bias in the included studies, data extraction, and the approach to meta-analysis. Crucial issues such as selecting the model for meta-analysis, generating and interpreting forest plots, assessing the risk of publication bias, cautions in the interpretation of subgroup and sensitivity analyses, rating certainty of the evidence using GRADE guideline, and standardized reporting of meta-analysis (PRISMA) are covered in detail. While the focus of this book is on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials (RCTs), the gold standard of clinical research, the essentials of systematic reviews of non-RCTs, diagnostic test accuracy studies, animal studies, individual participant data meta-analysis, and network meta-analysis are also covered.

Practical advice on how to conduct a synthesis of research in the social, behavioral, and health sciences. Written in plain language with four running examples drawn from psychology, education, and health science. Coverage of literature searching and the technical aspects of meta-analysis.

In this Third Edition of the classic Systematic Reviews textbook, a team of distinguished researchers deliver a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the rapidly evolving area of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. The book demonstrates why systematic reviews--when conducted properly--provide the highest quality evidence on clinical and public health interventions and shows how they contribute to inference in many other contexts. The new edition reflects the broad role of systematic reviews, including: Twelve new chapters, covering additional study designs, methods and software, for example, on genetic association studies, prediction models, prevalence studies, network and dose-response meta-analysis.