Reviewing the literature

Reference resources to guide and support you in conducting a Cochrane Review. Includes systematic reviews of interventions and qualitative evidence synthesis.

This manual guides authors who wish to conduct systematic and scoping reviews following JBI methodologies.

The latest guidelines for the planning and conduct of CEE Evidence Syntheses in environmental management. Includes systematic reviews, systematic maps, and rapid reviews.

This paper provides guidance on producing Evidence and Gap Maps for publication in Campbell Systematic Reviews.

Here you can access information about the PRISMA reporting guidelines, which are designed to help authors transparently report why their systematic review was done, what methods they used, and what they found.

The flow diagram depicts the flow of information through the different phases of a systematic review. It maps out the number of records identified, included and excluded, and the reasons for exclusions.

Several extensions of the PRISMA statement are available to facilitate the reporting of different types or aspects of systematic reviews. For example, scoping reviews, protocols or searches.

The ENTREQ statement can help researchers to report the stages most commonly associated with the synthesis of qualitative health research: searching and selecting qualitative research, quality appraisal, and methods for synthesising qualitative findings.

ROSES is a collaborative initiative with the aim of improving the standards of reporting in evidence syntheses.

Checklists to help you more easily and accurately perform critical appraisal across a number of different study types.

JBI’s critical appraisal tools assist in assessing the trustworthiness, relevance and results of published papers.

Critical appraisal worksheets to help you appraise the reliability, importance and applicability of clinical evidence.

These checklists were subjected to evaluation and adaptation to meet SIGN’s requirements for a balance between methodological rigour and practicality of use.

GRADE is a systematic approach to rating the certainty of evidence in systematic reviews and other evidence syntheses.

The resources in this collection mostly cover the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials (RoB 2).

With moves to base more decisions on real world observational evidence, AMSTAR 2 should assist in the identification of high quality systematic reviews

Material on the effects of interventions in health care. Hosted on the Wiley InterScience platform. The Library comprises the following databases: The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effectiveness; The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register. The NHS Economic Evaluation database. The Cochrane Database of Methodology Reviews. Health Technology Assessment Database.

Resources for evidence-based research including Best Practice information sheets, systematic reviews and electronic journals and conference papers.

Registers systematic, rapid, and umbrella reviews (no scoping reviews).

A collection of published reviews and protocols by the Campbell Collaboration, which focuses on reviews outside of clinical medicine.

An open community of stakeholders working towards a sustainable global environment and the conservation of biodiversity. CEE seeks to promote and deliver evidence syntheses on issues of greatest concern to environmental policy and practice as a public service.

Figshare is a collaborative digital repository for Federation researchers, professional staff and Higher Degree by Research students to store, share and publish their digital files

A general pre-print repository by the Center for Open Science covering a wide range of disciplines.

This tool is designed to assist users with selecting which of the 41 included quantitative or qualitative knowledge synthesis would be appropriate for their research question through a set of simple questions.

This decision tree by Cornell University Library can help decide which review methodology best meets your needs.

Part of the Bond University Systematic Review Accelerator set of tools, SpiderCite allows you to upload a set of articles and see a list of references cited by them, and a list of references citing them. This can be useful at the final stage of your search when you have your included articles and need to search the reference lists.

This website automates finding all the references from a set of studies, and all the articles that cite them.

Text mines PubMed to highlight prominent authors and papers, and frequently occurring terms in the results that may be added to your search terms.

This tool finds potential MeSH terms from the abstract of an article, or a research question, as well as finding similar articles in PubMed. It is useful if you want to find articles on a topic to look at keywords and MeSH terms.

From Bond University's Systematic Review Accelerator, upload a file of key papers from EndNote and see the frequency of words in the abstracts and titles.

The InterTASC Information Specialists' Sub-Group Search Filter Resource is a collaborative venture to identify, assess and test search filters designed to retrieve research by study design or focus.

Evidence-based literature search strategies, developed using an explicit methodology and tested using a gold standard test comparison study design and detailed in published papers.

Includes filters for geography, populations, conditions, and settings

Elicit uses semantic language models to help find articles that match a research question. You can also upload a PDF to find similar articles. Features include a brief summary of the findings and possible critiques.

This tool allows you to see connections between authors and articles. Results are displayed as a list or a visualisation. You can also get suggested relevant articles emailed to you.

EndNote is a reference management tool which is very useful in reviews. You can add references from search results, share with collaborators and supervisors, and remove duplicate references.

Covidence is a tool designed to streamline the review process from title & abstract screening through to extraction. It allows review teams to significantly reduce the time spent of reviews to produce evidence much faster.