| Popis: |
Before embarking on an intervention trial, it is essential to review what is already known. The most objective way to do this is to conduct a systematic review of studies that have already been published on the topic. The reader is guided through each of the five key steps in a systematic review: Defining the question; Identifying relevant studies; Assessing the quality of each relevant study; Summarising the evidence; Interpreting the findings. A structured ‘PICOS’ approach is described for defining the question that the systematic review will address, and techniques for searching electronic databases of the relevant published literature are presented. Methods for assessing the quality and risk of bias of each study are introduced, and the reader is told how to prepare both a narrative and a quantitative (meta-analysis) summary of the findings. Finally, approaches to interpreting and reporting the findings from a systematic review are described. |
