Core Tasks of Systematic Reviewing
Systematic reviews are reviews of the scientific literature that follow a methodology for minimizing bias in study retrieval and interpretation. Systematic reviews that include a quantitative synthesis of trial results are also called quantitative overviews or meta-analyses.
The performance of a systematic review consists of the following five core tasks. Click on the headings to see how we have decomposed these top-level tasks into subtasks, methods, and information needs. These information needs are the basis for the data modeling in our trial bank project.
- Trial Retrieval
- Retrieval of all trials relevant to the overall study question.
- Judgment of Internal Validity
- Judgment of the extent to which a trial's design and execution will yield unbiased estimates of the true underlying effect.
- Judgment of Generalizability
- Judgment of the extent to which a trial's results can be generalized to a setting different from that of the original trial.
- Quantitative Synthesis
- Use of statistical techniques such as meta-analysis for synthesizing quantitative trial results.
- Contextual Interpretation
- Interpretation of a trial within the full scientific, ethical, and socioeconomic context of the condition under investigation.
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