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 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.
To request access to UOW’s Covidence account, you must be either a currently enrolled student or currently employed staff member of UOW.
The Covidence Knowledge Base and Getting Started with Covidence videos provide comprehensive support.
Sign in with your personal account and access Covidence.
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:
A comprehensive set of critical appraisal tools can be found on the University of South Australia’s library guide.
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.
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:
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.
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 is an international register for prospective systematic literature reviews.
It includes protocol details for systematic reviews relevant to:
Protocols can include any type of any study design where there is a health-related outcome.
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 is an open repository where you can make your review protocol citable, shareable and discoverable.
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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