Systematic Reviews: Home

Before You Begin: 

• Consider the time required: Librarians are very quick and efficient with their portion of the systematic review process. However, completing a full systematic review typically takes 6 to 18 months, as search results often yield several thousand citations that require thorough screening and analysis. If you are unable to commit to this time frame, please consider pursuing another type of search that may be more manageable. More info
• Assemble your team: Principal investigator MUST be a full-time caregiver due to high volume of requests. This person will serve as principal investigator and primary contact with librarians. You will need a minimum of 2-3 members for the review stage to minimize bias.  For additional team members, we suggest including subject experts, librarians for help with search strategies, and statisticians for help with data analysis. Additional reviewers do not have to be affiliated with Cleveland Clinic.
• Perform an initial literature search: Make sure no one else has already published systematic review on the topic, and try to find some articles that will be used in your review.
   

Summary of the Process

1. Develop a clearly defined research question using PICO or similar tools  More info
2. Determine inclusion/exclusion criteria, such as: types of studies, minimum number of participants, ages, gender, language, or date restrictions
3. Write and register protocol to document methodology  More info
4. Develop a search strategy, test, then run in multiple databases. Search for additional articles in grey literature, registries, hand searching journals, and checking references in articles
5. Screen title/abstracts. First pass to select articles matching protocol criteria  
6. Obtain/read full text of articles that passed screening to determine eligibility.  Document reasons why articles are included/excluded
7. Analyze articles for data, quality, and bias
8. Write review and submit for publication

Services

• Conduct literature searches
• Document the search process
• Upload results into Covidence
• Write search methodology section of paper

Request a Evidence Synthesis Project

Complete our Evidence Synthesis Project Planning Form  (Please use Google Chrome browser to access this form.) After we receive your form, we will contact you to schedule a consultation.

Acknowledgement / Authorship

Librarians are an invaluable part of the systematic review research team. The comprehensive review is based off of the librarians intellectual contributions and therefore should always be included as authors in a comprehensive search paper. However, we expect the following as minimum acknowledgement for being part of the team: 

• Co-authorship is mandatory if librarians write/edit parts of the paper
• An acknowledgement of the librarian's contribution to the systematic review

• Systematic review requests must be submitted using our Evidence Synthesis Project Planning Form . Once this has been submitted, a librarian will contact you to schedule a consultation and begin the process. 
• Primary Investigator must be a full-time caregiver. This person will serve as the primary contact with the library.
• Each librarian will only perform one systematic review per patron at a time. Due to the time commitments involved with systematic reviews, library staff are unable to provide these services for students, part-time employees or other temporary project personnel.  Library staff continues to provide standard literature search services for students, part-time employees, and temporary project personnel.
• While we do try to work as quickly as possible, we receive a large volume of systematic review requests. Please be aware that there may be up to a two-week delay in processing your request. After you have submitted your request form, we will contact you to discuss timelines. 

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