How to Do a Systematic Review: A Best Practice Guide for Conducting and Reporting Narrative Reviews, Meta-Analyses, and Meta-Syntheses.

By Andy P. Siddaway, Alex M. Wood, L. Hedges. Annual Review of Psychology, 2019

2,142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Systematic reviews are characterized by a methodical and replicable methodology and presentation. They involve a comprehensive search to locate all relevant published and unpublished work on a subject; a systematic integration of search results; and a critique of the extent, nature, and quality of evidence in relation to a particular research question. The best reviews synthesize studies to draw broad theoretical conclusions about what a literature means, linking theory to evidence and evidence to theory. This guide describes how to plan, conduct, organize, and present a systematic review of quantitative (meta-analysis) or qualitative (narrative review, meta-synthesis) information. We outline core standards and principles and describe commonly encountered problems. Although this guide targets psychological scientists, its high level of abstraction makes it potentially relevant to any subject area or discipline. We argue that systematic reviews are a key methodology for clarifying whether and how research findings replicate and for explaining possible inconsistencies, and we call for researchers to conduct systematic reviews to help elucidate whether there is a replication crisis.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Epidemiology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/502c9122dda395eb30bd0707a85bc235d4e6e3ba

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Citations in the corpus

A Meta-Analysis Investigating the Association Between Metacognition and Math Performance in Adolescence (2021, methodology): “This review was carried out following the best practice guidelines for conducting a systematic review published by Siddaway et al. (2019) and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis guidelines (PRISMA; Moher et al. 2015).”
Where you search determines what you find: the effects of bibliographic databases on systematic reviews (2021, neutral): “Whereas there are many literature search sources including physical libraries, contacting subject experts and reference checks, databases are often used in preference to other search methods (Green et al., 2006; Siddaway et al., 2019) due to their ability to access literature from a wide range of”
Digital Mental Health Interventions for Depression, Anxiety, and Enhancement of Psychological Well-Being Among College Students: Systematic Review (2018, positive): “Following the systematic narrative framework for literature reviews [39], the results of included studies were synthesized and presented without reference to the statistical significance of the findings.”
Plastic recycling in additive manufacturing: A systematic literature review and opportunities for the circular economy (2020, methodology): “A systematic review protocol is used to carry out the selection of the studies based on the guidelines of Siddaway et al. (2019).”
Systematicity in Organizational Research Literature Reviews: A Framework and Assessment (2021, methodology): “Such an approach also harmonizes the written review with any summary tables extracted from the coding database (Siddaway et al., 2019).”
Associations between Nature Exposure and Health: A Review of the Evidence (2021, background): “A narrative review synthesizes the results of quantitative studies that employ diverse methodologies and/or theoretical frameworks without a focus on the statistical significance of the studies’ results [12,13].”
Research self-efficacy: A meta-analysis (2021, methodology): “In those cases where the design suggested that a correlation between RSE and another variable had been computed, but correlations were not reported, we attempted to retrieve these correlations by writing to the corresponding authors following the recommendations of Siddaway et al. (2019).”