Systematic Reviews of the Evidence
Why conduct systematic reviews?
Practitioners, patients and policy makers all need to keep abreast of the latest medical research, but keeping current with the steady flow of research findings published in hundreds of professional journals every week is extremely difficult, especially when study results conflict, or when study methods are not comparable.
What is a systematic review?
A systematic review is a formal, organized method for compiling, evaluating and summarizing all of the published research evidence related to a specific medical topic. Results of a systematic review provide the best information for making decisions about treatment, practice or behavior.
Our methods
Steps in the systematic review process include:
- Identifying topics for review that are important to consumers and clinicians;
- Conducting comprehensive literature searches of peer-reviewed articles;
- Extracting and combining data from the relevant articles;
- Conducting a review of the articles by a team of experts;
- Producing a technical report of the results. Learn more about these methods.
Read about our progress in conducting systematic reviews.
