Methodology in conducting a systematic review of systematic reviews of healthcare interventions

By V. Smith, D. Devane, C. Begley, Mike Clarke. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2011

1,144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundHundreds of studies of maternity care interventions have been published, too many for most people involved in providing maternity care to identify and consider when making decisions. It became apparent that systematic reviews of individual studies were required to appraise, summarise and bring together existing studies in a single place. However, decision makers are increasingly faced by a plethora of such reviews and these are likely to be of variable quality and scope, with more than one review of important topics. Systematic reviews (or overviews) of reviews are a logical and appropriate next step, allowing the findings of separate reviews to be compared and contrasted, providing clinical decision makers with the evidence they need.MethodsThe methods used to identify and appraise published and unpublished reviews systematically, drawing on our experiences and good practice in the conduct and reporting of systematic reviews are described. The process of identifying and appraising all published reviews allows researchers to describe the quality of this evidence base, summarise and compare the review's conclusions and discuss the strength of these conclusions.ResultsMethodological challenges and possible solutions are described within the context of (i) sources, (ii) study selection, (iii) quality assessment (i.e. the extent of searching undertaken for the reviews, description of study selection and inclusion criteria, comparability of included studies, assessment of publication bias and assessment of heterogeneity), (iv) presentation of results, and (v) implications for practice and research.ConclusionConducting a systematic review of reviews highlights the usefulness of bringing together a summary of reviews in one place, where there is more than one review on an important topic. The methods described here should help clinicians to review and appraise published reviews systematically, and aid evidence-based clinical decision-making.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a83d1f7bf85b2732b8e897a9189cf5fe84c620ca

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Citations in the corpus

Clarifying differences between review designs and methods (2012, methodology): “These reviews of reviews may draw on the data of previous reviews either by using the findings of previous reviews or by drilling down to using data from the primary studies in the reviews [37].”
The Impact of mHealth Interventions: Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews (2018, neutral): “The new search was more specific to make assessment manageable and was supplemented by a manual search of reference lists [9].”
Synthesizing information systems knowledge: A typology of literature reviews (2015, background): “Given that knowledge synthesis is not a new concept and that leading methodologists have proposed several approaches and methods to review the literature, it clearly appears that a typology is more aligned with our initial objective.”
Factors that influence the implementation of e-health: a systematic review of systematic reviews (an update) (2016, methodology): “A systematic review of reviews provides a summary of evidence from a variety of different levels, including the combination of different interventions, different populations and different settings [10] in a coherent and economical way [7].”
Evaluating and enhancing quality in higher education teaching practice: a meta- review (2020, methodology): “A search strategy, utilising a range of text words, synonyms and subject headings for the major concepts of literature review, quality improvement and teaching practice, was developed by the review team that included researchers with systematic review and subject matter expertise (SM, CB, RH) (Smith”
Urban natural environments as nature-based solutions for improved public health - A systematic review of reviews. (2017, methodology): “We conducted a structured review of reviews in accordance with the methodology described in Smith et al. (2011).”
Risks associated with obesity in pregnancy, for the mother and baby: a systematic review of reviews (2015, positive): “Accordingly, our research group set out to conduct a systematic review of systematic reviews, as promoted by the Cochrane Collaboration (10) and described by other papers (11,12).”
Summarizing systematic reviews: methodological development, conduct and reporting of an umbrella review approach (2015, positive): “Alongside the presentation of quantitative data, the number of reviews that inform the outcome, number of participants (from included reviews) and statistical heterogeneity should also be reported.(4) An example of the table of findings for an umbrella review titled ‘ Effectiveness of non-pharmacolo”
Systematic review finds overlapping reviews were not mentioned in every other overview. (2014, background): “This is a limitation of SRs, which may be overcome by using overviews [2].”