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Evidence Synthesis and Systematic Reviews

What is an evidence synthesis? How do you do a systematic review? And how can the library help?

Question Frameworks

Good research starts with a good research question. There are a number of useful frameworks for developing good research questions, including:

  • PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) (and the related PICOT (PICO+Time) and PICOS (PICO+Study type))
  • PICo (Population, Interest, Context) (qualitative research)
  • ECLIPSE (Expectation, Client Group, Location, Impact, Professionals, Service) - formerly CLIP
  • EPIS (Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, Sustainment)
  • SPICE (Setting, Perspective, Intervention, Comparison, Evaluation)
  • SPIDER (Sample, Phenomenon of interest, Design, Evaluation, Research type)

Reporting Frameworks

It's a good idea to know what you might be required to include when you publish your review. Here are several reporting frameworks, the best known of which is PRISMA.

  • PRISMA: Health sciences + other disciplines
  • PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR): Health Sciences + other disciplines
  • ROSES: Collaboration for Environmental Evidence, RepOrting standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses
  • JARS: American Psychological Association’s guidelines for journal article reporting*
  • AERA: American Educational Research Association reporting standards for empirical social science research
  • MECCIR: Campbell’s Methodological Expectations of Campbell Collaboration Intervention Reviews
  • RAMSES: Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards
  • TARCIS: Terminology, Application, and Reporting of Citation Searching

 

 

* also see: Heidi M Levitt. (2020). Reporting Qualitative Research in Psychology : How to Meet APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards, Revised Edition, 2020 Copyright: Vol. Revised edition. American Psychological Association.

Protocols, procedures, and checklists

Citation manager processes

I use Zotero most often, so a sample procedure would be something like:

  1. Set up a new "group" for the project, shared with any collaborators.
  2. Add folders for each search and import the results either by downloading a file of results or using Zotero's result list import. Using separate folders allows for tracking and reporting of each step in the process.
  3. De-duplication across all the folders. (After de-duping, the original results folders are not modified. The selected items are copied to new folders, and nothing is deleted.)
  4. Title/abstract review with selected items going into a new folder. If I'm doing a full fledged systematic review with others, we could each have our own folder. If separate review software is being used (Excel, Rayyan, etc.) then the selected items are added to a new folder after review, for tracking purposes.
  5. Use Zotero PDF fetching feature to get PDFs for the full text review, and attach articles gained otherwise (ILL, etc.) manually.
  6. Set up another folder (or set of folders) for the final articles.
  7. If any updates or additional searches are performed, new folders should be created.
  8. Zotero allows export of citations in a variety of formats, including CSV for analysis by other types of programs.