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Systematic Review

How the Library can help when you're conducting a systematic review

Tools for systematic reviews

There are many tools you can use when conducting a systematic review. These tools are designed to assist with the key stages of the process, including title and abstract screening, data synthesis, and critical appraisal.

Registering your review is recommended best practice and options are explored in the Register your review section of this guide.

Covidence

Covidence is a web-based screening and data extraction tool for authors conducting systematic and scoping reviews. Covidence includes functions to support uploading search results, screening abstracts, conducting risk of bias assessments and more to make your review production more efficient. 

How to join University of Wollongong’s Covidence account 

To request access to UOW’s Covidence account, you must be either a currently enrolled student or currently employed staff member of UOW.  

  1. Go to the Covidence sign-up page 
  2. Enter your first name and UOW email address, then click “Request Invitation” 
  3. You will receive an invitation email sent by covidence.org. Open the email and click “Accept Invitation” 
  4. Follow the prompts to create your personal Covidence account using the same UOW email address. 

Covidence support 

The Covidence Knowledge Base and Getting Started with Covidence videos provide comprehensive support. 

Already signed up? 

Sign in with your personal account and access Covidence.

Critical appraisal tools

Critical appraisal skills enable you to systematically assess the trustworthiness, relevance and results of published papers. The Centre for Evidence Based Medicine defines critical appraisal as the systematic evaluation of clinical research papers in order to establish: 

  • Does this study address a clearly focused question? 
  • Did the study use valid methods to address this question? 
  • Are the valid results of this study important? 
  • Are these valid, important results applicable to my patient or population? 

A comprehensive set of critical appraisal tools can be found on the University of South Australia’s library guide.

JBI SUMARI

JBI SUMARI facilitates the entire review process, from protocol development, team management, study selection, critical appraisal, data extraction, data synthesis and writing your systematic review. This tool is developed by the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI).

To set up a personal OVID account and access SUMARI as UOW staff or student, follow these instructions.

Risk of bias tools

The NHMRC states that risks of bias are the likelihood that features of the study design or conduct of the study will give misleading results. This can result in wasted resources, lost opportunities for effective interventions or harm to consumers. 

See riskofbias.info for details of tools you can use to asses risk of bias, including: 

  • RoB 2.0: Cochrane's risk of bias tool for randomised controlled trials 
  • ROBINS-I: evaluates the risk of bias in the studies that compare the health effects of two or more interventions 
  • ROBINS-E: provides a structured approach to assessing the risk of bias in observational epidemiological studies 
  • ROB ME: a tool for assessing risk of bias due to missing evidence in a synthesis 
  • Robvis: a web app designed to for visualizing risk-of-bias assessments performed as part of a systematic review. 

Systematic Reviewlution

Systematic Reviewlution is a living review compiling evidence of where published systematic reviews are not being done well. Awareness of these problems will enable researchers, publishers and decision makers to conduct better systematic reviews in the future

The review includes a framework of common problems with systematic reviews, that should be considered as your develop your own review protocols.

Register your review

It is good practice to register your systematic review with PROSPERO or the International Database of Education Systematic Reviews. Scoping and rapid reviews can be registered with Figshare or Open Science Framework (OSF).

PROSPERO

PROSPERO is an international register for prospective systematic literature reviews.

It includes protocol details for systematic reviews relevant to:

  • health and public health
  • social care and welfare
  • education
  • crime and justice
  • international development

Protocols can include any type of any study design where there is a health-related outcome.

International Database of Education Systematic Reviews (IDESR)

IDESR is a database of published systematic reviews in Education and a clearinghouse for protocol registration of ongoing and planned systematic reviews. IDESR accepts registrations of protocols for systematic reviews in all fields of education.

Figshare

Figshare is an open repository where you can make your review protocol citable, shareable and discoverable.

Open Science Framework (OSF)

Recommended by PRISMA and PRISMA-ScR, the Open Science Framework is a free, open platform to support users' research and enable collaboration.

 

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