Before you decide to conduct a systematic review, consider the following:
Time:
A systematic review can take 12-18 months to complete depending on the team's experience level and the number of questions included in the review.
Team:
You will need a minimum of 2 team members to review the literature plus 1 tie-breaker. Team members should include content area experts and may require the inclusion of a librarian and statistician. It would be beneficial if the team lead has experience publishing articles; preferably with some previous systematic review exposure. A fellow, resident or student can be a team member but should not be the team lead.
Question:
Do you have clearly defined questions? Are you familiar with current literature? Consider requesting a literature search to identify recent systematic reviews on your topic as duplication may impact publisher acceptance of your review. A literature search to determine if sufficient quality studies have been recently published may help to determine if a systematic review is possible and identify seed articles to inform the search strategy. You may also want to consider writing a different type of review. See Table 1 for different review options. A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies - Grant - 2009 - Health Information & Libraries Journal - Wiley Online Library
Additional considerations:
Librarian availability to conduct searches for a systematic review is limited. The team can request a consultation with a Librarian to discuss the scope and terminology before database searches begin. Please use the Library Services Form to request a meeting with a Librarian to discuss your project. The team lead will need to be available for the consultation. Inclusion and exclusion criteria should be confirmed prior to creating the search strategy. The systematic review protocol should be registered.
Systematic Review Steps:
Select your team
Clarify the research questions
Define inclusion / exclusion criteria
Select databases
Identify grey literature sources
Create master search strategy
Team review of search strategy
Translate and run searches in selected databases
Import results into citation management software and deduplicate
Screen title and abstracts
Retrieve and screen full-text articles
Risk of bias assessment
Data extraction
Meta-analysis or evidence synthesis
Write manuscript