Systematic Reviews: A How-To Guide

Workshop 1: Setting Yourself Up for Success

This workshop covers what is needed to plan your systematic review (or other evidence synthesis review) and create a review protocol that can be used to guide you through the review process. Topics to be covered in this session:

• Defining your question
• Creating your protocol
• Picking databases
• Developing inclusion/exclusion criteria
• Pre-scan of the literature and identifying seed papers
• Analyzing seed papers
• Keywords and subject headings

Workshop 2: Developing Your Data Collection Strategy

This workshop covers the key concepts/skills needed to create a data collection strategy for your review project. Creating a comprehensive search strategy that is designed to capture as many relevant studies as possible and is validated using a test set, is similar to designing your data collection method in an experimental study. It requires careful planning as well as knowledge of how databases work. Topics to be covered:

• Elements of a comprehensive search
• Designing and building a comprehensive search in one database
• Saving searches
• Validating searches using a test set
• Data management practices

Workshop 3: The Next Steps: translating, tracking, reporting and study selection

This workshop covers the remaining steps of the data collection phase of your systematic review/knowledge synthesis review project and introduce you to the study selection process. Topics to be covered:

• Translating searches from one database to another
• Supplementary search techniques
• Reporting guidelines (PRISMA)
• Exporting records from databases
• Deduplicating using Covidence
• Study selection process