Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

With an ever-increasing plethora of research studies and articles being published, it is challenging for busy clinicians and researchers to keep up to date with the literature. Systematic reviews identify, appraise, and present a summary of all relevant available evidence on a given topic, including the quality of available evidence. Often, systematic reviews include a meta-analysis component, which involves statistical techniques to synthesize data from several studies into a single quantitative summary estimate with confidence intervals. Readers must be able to identify reviews that are both credible and contain effect estimates that they can be confident about. The PRISMA checklist is a tool used to improve the reporting of systematic reviews while the GRADE approach provides a framework for evaluating the certainty of evidence of reported outcomes. This chapter briefly summarizes critical steps on how to perform, read, appraise, and incorporate evidence from a systematic review into clinical practice.