When searching for scholarly and/or grey literature, be conscious of the type of literature you are retrieving.
Levels of evidence are a way to designate the strength of studies based on the methodological quality of their design, validity, and applicability to patient care. The lowest level is at the bottom of the pyramid, the highest is on the top. It is important to use the highest level of evidence that you can for a systematic review, recognizing that for some topics, you may need to use lower quality studies.
Systematic Review: A summary of the medical literature that uses explicit methods to perform a comprehensive literature search & critical appraisal of individual studies & that uses appropriate statistical techniques to combine these valid studies
Critically Appraised Topics (Evidence Synthesis): Summarizes the current state of knowledge about the prevention and treatment of clinical conditions, based on thorough searches and appraisal of the literature.
Critically Appraised Individual Articles (Article Synopses): A short summary of an article from the literature, created to answer a specific clinical question.
Randomized Controlled Trial: Participants are randomly allocated into experimental or control groups & are followed over time for the variables/outcomes of interest. Clinicians & laboratory workers may also be blinded to participant groups.
Cohort Study: Identifies participants who currently have a certain condition or receive a particular treatment are followed over time & compared with another group of people who are not affected by the condition.
Case Control Study: Identifies participants who have a certain outcome (cases) & participants without that outcome (controls). Investigators look back over time to see if they had the specific exposure.
Case Report/Case Series: A report on one or more participants with a particular outcome. No control group is involved.
(Norwich University, 2020)
The thorough nature of systematic reviews means that they involve the use of a lot of references, so a citation management program will keep you organized and save you a lot of time when doing your evidence synthesis. Programs like Endnote, Zotero or Mendeley will store and organize the citations collected during your screening, de-duplicate the results and automatically format in-text citations and bibliographies in your manuscript.
After completing your searches in your selected databases, there will be a number of duplicates. Deduplication is the process of removing these duplicates. Many reference management programs include a deduplication tool.
Consult UVic's Citation management at UVic: Managing your references research guide to select a tool that suits your needs.
Free to download for all internet users. In addition to installing the program on your computer, Mendeley includes online access to your reference collection for work on the go. Download includes a "Save to Mendeley" bookmarklet. Direct exporting from some databases.
Free to download for all internet users. Includes downloadable program for your computer as well as online access to your collection. Download includes a Zotero bookmarklet. Direct exporting from some databases.
A very popular reference manager. Direct exporting is supported by most databases. EndNote Basic (online only) is a limited version that is available for free for UVic students and faculty.
RevMan
Free to download for all internet users. RevMan (short for Review Manager) is Cochrane's in-house reference manager. It is geared especially toward systematic reviews. You can also use RevMan to produce forest plots, the preferred method of visualizing evidence in Cochrane Reviews.
Norwich University, 2020. Evidence-based practice guidelines: critical appraisal. Retrieved from https://guides.norwich.edu/EBP/criticalappraisal
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