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Systematic Reviews

Preliminary search

After formulating the focused research question, you will be able to identify a few key concepts on your proposed topic.  You may conduct a preliminary search using these keywords to make a decision on: 

  1. What type of reviews you may want to conduct? 
  2. Are there any systematic reviews (see "Find existing systematic review") or on-going reviews ( click on  "Protocol" tab) have been published on your topic? 
  3. Are there enough studies to be included for a systematic review? (click on "Bibliographic Database" tab) 

Find existing systematic review

Search filters developed by healthevidence.org for MEDLINE, EMBASE and CINAHL are discussed in the paper: Lee, E., Dobbins, M., DeCorby, K. et al. An optimal search filter for retrieving systematic reviews and meta-analyses. BMC Med Res Methodol 12, 51 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2288-12-51

Sources include: British National Formulary, Clinical Knowledge Summaries, SIGN, the Cochrane Library and Royal Colleges, Social Care Online and GOV.UK.

The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Library is a repository for publications and information for policy makers, health professionals, health scientists and others with a practical or academic interest in evidence based healthcare.

*Due to a lack of funding , content on from 2016 and beyond is not as comprehensive as previously. Therefore, users are recommended to also search for more recent evidence using other freely available search engines and databases such as PEDro, and PubMed.

Evidence-based guidance for business leaders, contains business reviews