Systematic Review Process: Systematic Review Planning Process

Before you begin a systematic review project consider these issues:

• Have you checked to verify whether a systematic review already exists on your topic? Check for protocols and published reviews.
• Do you have adequate time and resources, to commit around 12 months to the review?
• Systematic reviews should not be undertaken by just one person. Cochrane recommends multidisciplinary teams work best.
• To ensure rigor, follow established standards and guidelines.
• Is a systematic review the right review type for your topic and/or research question? You may find this decision tree from Cornell University helpful.
• Familiarize yourself with various review types by reading widely .
• Broaden your knowledge about systematic reviews further, by reading as much as you can about the process and find examples of good reviews.

For lists of the specific tasks you will need to perform

• Refer to this checklist from Wake Forest School of Medicine to help plan your review.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality describes a systematic review as 

"...critical assessment and evaluation of all research studies that address a particular clinical issue. The researchers use an organized method of locating, assembling, and evaluating a body of literature on a particular topic using a set of specific criteria. A systematic review typically includes a description of the findings of the collection of research studies. The systematic review may also include a quantitative pooling of data, called a meta-analysis." (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Glossary of Terms, 2014)

A systematic review follows a strict methodology and is therefore transparent, rigorous and replicable.

The review process can be described in these steps:

1. Formulate your question
2. Search for studies
3. Assess the quality of the studies
4. Summarize the evidence
5. Interpret the findings

(Khan, 2003). 

Characteristics of a systematic review include:

• Clearly defined question with inclusion and exclusion criteria
• An explicit, replicable methodology
• Rigorous and systematic search of the literature (including published and unpublished studies)
• Critical appraisal of included studies
• Data extraction and management
• Analysis and interpretation of results
• Report for publication

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offered a beginners' workshop on systematic reviews. The Introduction to Conducting a Systematic Review workshop, offered in October 2020, covered recommended standards, methods, and tools for completing a systematized, scoping, or systematic review at UNC. 

This workshop recording is available as a series of short videos on the process of conducting a review.

Although the workshop refers to some resources that are unique to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the content can be applied to researchers at other institutions. It is recommended for those who have not yet conducted such a review but are planning to do so.

Glossary of Terms (2001, November). Glossary of Terms: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Khan, K. S., Kunz, R., Kleijnen, J., & Antes, G. (2003). Five steps to conducting a systematic review. Journal of the royal society of medicine, 96(3), 118-121.