PREPARING FOR A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW: PLANNING THE PROCESS - VIDEO 1 transcript 2 00:00 --> 00:26 Welcome to the 1st video in our Conducting a Systematic Review, planning the process, class. In this series of videos, we will take a look at the planning process for a systematic review through the lens of PRISMA P. Prisma P is a checklist of items that you should include in a protocol. That might not mean anything to you at this point, but it will when we're done. 3 00:27 --> 01:24 In this particular video, I will provide an overview of basic steps in the systematic review process and discuss the early stages of preparing for a review. I will reference two GalterGuides during this video series: our Systematic Reviews and Reporting Research and Evaluating Studies GalterGuides. To access them, go to Galter Library's homepage. Scroll down to the list of Popular Resources, and click GalterGuides. Click on Systematic Reviews, and select the specific guide of interest. The Systematic Reviews guide introduces systematic review services at Galter and recommendations for conducting systematic reviews. Reporting Research and Evaluating Studies includes a list of critical appraisal tools, which we will discuss later on. 4 01:25 --> 02:03 What is a systematic review? The Cochrane Collaboration states that "A systematic review attempts to identify, appraise and synthesize all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria to answer a specific research question." I want to highlight three elements in this statement: identify, appraise, and synthesize. This is not just a literature review. You're not just finding some of the evidence that's out there and conveying it. You are finding everything, theoretically, that is out there, critically appraising it, and then synthesizing it for your readers. 5 02:04 --> 02:56 You may have seen this pyramid before. It's a simplified ranking of types of evidence. At the bottom we have background information and expert opinion. This includes textbooks, entries from UpToDate, etc. Above that we have unfiltered information: primary research or original studies. Above that, we have filtered information that includes critical appraisal. At the top of the pyramid rests systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Systematic reviews are rigorous and should be performed in adherence with standards, because they are considered to be the highest level of evidence. The term systematic review is a buzzword that is frequently misused. However journal publishers and peer reviewers are increasingly aware of the standards that exist, and you will have greater success publishing a systematic review that adheres to those standards. 6 02:57 --> 03:24 Here is an overview of steps in a systematic review. This will give you some context when we discuss these in depth through the lens of the PRISMA P checklist. The first steps are deciding on the research question of the review then checking to see if there is already a systematic review that answers your question. Next, writing the protocol, in which you plan all of the following steps. Coming up with a search strategy. Running the search and processing the results for screening. 7 03:25 --> 04:35 Let's talk about screening. Screening occurs in two phases: title/abstract screening and full text screening. In the title/abstract phase, a minimum of two reviewers should independently review all records and vote based solely on the title/abstract whether they may merit inclusion in your review. Once all reviewers are done, you compare votes and resolve any conflicts. Any records that pass the title/abstract phase are then moved to full text screening. Here is where you decide, based on a review of each record's full text, which records will be included in your review. After screening, comes data extraction. You record in an organized fashion the data that you need from these studies, such as the participant makeup of a study, outcomes evaluated etc. Synthesize the data, through either qualitative or quantitative analysis A quick note. We will discuss the library's systematic review services in the last video, but here is a quick highlight of the phases that our librarians can help you with. 8 04:36 --> 05:30 Defining your research question. A systematic review should answer a focused clinical question. If your question is too broad, you will find an overabundance of literature. If your question is too specific, you will have insufficient literature. Let's say that you have a topic such as "acute pancreatitis." That's the subject matter of a book chapter or a broader literature review. Let's turn that into a specific question: "What are the feeding strategies for the management of acute pancreatitis?" Closer, but that would be a question for a scoping review. A scoping review is rigorous, like a systematic review, but it finds out what's out there on a topic. The systematic review version of that question would compare two or three specific feeding strategies for acute pancreatitis. 9 05:31 --> 06:45 Finding existing systematic reviews. Before you embark on a systematic review, you want to make sure it's not redundant. Are there already published or in progress reviews on your topic? You don't want to waste effort if there's not a need for a systematic review of the literature. If there is already a systematic review on your topic, can you justify a need for your review to the people to whom you would be submitting a manuscript? Perhaps the existing review is out of date or of poor quality. Where should you search for existing systematic reviews? We recommend searching the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and PubMed for published reviews. Search PROSPERO, a protocol registry, for in-progress reviews. Let's do a sample search in PROSPERO for acute pancreatitis. There will be protocols in PROSPERO for reviews that have been abandoned or delayed, so you can always reach out to the team to verify that the review is still in progress. 10 06:46 --> 06:53 To learn about protocols and PRISMA P, please proceed to Video 2.