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Request for a Systematic or Scoping Review

Questions to Ask Before You Submit Your Systematic or Scoping Review Request

  1. Are you sure that you want to work on a Systematic or Scoping Review and not a Narrative Review?A narrative review or traditional literature review often includes the author(s) bias or point of view and takes less time to complete. Narrative reviews do not always use a rigorous methodological approach.
  2. Do you and your team have the time required to investigate, screen the comprehensive search results, and publish a systematic or scoping review (usually between 6 and 18 months)?
  3. If your topic is clinical are you able to frame the question using PICO (Patients/Populations, Interventions, Comparisons, Outcome(s))? While not all PICO elements are required to conduct your systematic review, this approach helps to describe what you want to find in the literature.
  4. Do you and your team have time to develop a research protocol? It is important to plan your research in advance of beginning your project. Your research plan, or review protocol, gives direction to your project. If you’re conducting a systematic review that addresses effects of interventions and strategies to prevent, diagnose, treat and monitor health conditions, for which there is a health-related outcome, consider free registration of your review protocol with PROSPERO: an international prospective register of systematic reviews.

Request for a Systematic or Scoping Review

Please complete the following form to submit your systematic review request.  Once submitted, a librarian will contact you to set up a meeting to discuss the project.

Systematic or Scoping Review Request

Definition of a Systematic Review

Systematic reviews are scientific investigations in themselves, with pre-planned methods and an assembly of original studies as their “subjects.” They synthesize the results of multiple primary investigations by using strategies that limit bias and random error. These strategies include a comprehensive search of all potentially relevant articles and the use of explicit, reproducible criteria in the selection of articles for review. Primary research designs and study characteristics are appraised, data are synthesized, and results are interpreted. From: Systematic Review: Synthesis of Best Evidence for Clinical Decisions. Cook DJ, Mulrow CD, Haynes RB. Ann Intern Med. 1997 Mar 1;126(5):376-80.

Definition of a Scoping Review

A scoping review is an assessment of the potential size and scope of available research literature. Scoping reviews are sometimes a precursor for conducting systematic reviews because they allow the investigator the opportunity to review the literature landscape and determine whether or not a systematic review is feasible. Scoping reviews also use systematic and rigorous methodologies.

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