Systematic Review as A Research Design: A Brief Overview

Abstract

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are proliferating in medical literature. Systematic reviews are
conducted widely in medical science to answer focused and specific clinical research questions. Researchers
employ a predetermined, explicit and progressive systematic methodology to comprehensively search for,
select, formally evaluate, analyze and cumulate the studies which gives results for stated research problem.
Meta-analysis; a further statistical step of systematic review is the statistical pooling of the results of studies.
Systematic reviews critically appraise and synthesize the best available evidences and findings to provide a
conclusion statement in regards to a specific answerable research question. The fame of systematic review
and its application are scarce in India especially in nursing science. This paper tries to simply draw basic
steps and concepts of Systematic review, along with guidelines and core methodology to be adopted while
doing a Systematic review.