Nancy K. Lowe, Editor Reviews of the literature play an important role in the advancement of nursing and biomedical science by combining the results of systematically chosen studies to come to conclusions about a body of research. The research literature on most topics pertinent to the care of women, infants, and their families is broad and interdisciplinary in origin and focus. The evolution o...

PURPOSE Are existing systematic reviews of interventions for age-related macular degeneration incorporated into clinical practice guidelines? DESIGN High-quality systematic reviews should be used to underpin evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and clinical care. We examined the reliability of systematic reviews of interventions for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and described ...

As a systematic review is a scientific exercise, and will influence health care decisions, it should have the same rigour that is expected of all research. The quality of a review, and so it’s worth, depends on the extent to which scientific review methods were used to minimise the risk of error and bias. It is the use of these explicit and rigorous methods that distinguish systematic reviews f...

13 editorial Systematic reviews are reproducible synthesis of the best available evidence to facilitate sounder clinical decisions. From the triad of factors that encompass evidence-based Dentistry — clinician's experience, patient's needs and preferences , available scientific evidence — systematic reviews clearly fit into the latter. What is important to underline is that scientific evidence ...

Research can be understood as systematic investigation to develop theories, establish evidence and solve problems. We can either undertake new research or we can learn from what others have already studied. How, then, do we go about finding out what has already been studied, how it has been studied, and what this research has found out? A common method is to undertake a review of the research l...

BACKGROUND Several systematic reviews and meta-analyses populate the literature on the effectiveness of laparoscopic surgery for colorectal cancer. The utility of this body of work is unclear. The objective of this study was to synthesize all such systematic reviews in terms of clinical effectiveness, to appraise their quality, and to determine whether areas of duplication exist across reviews....

The cornerstone to evidence-based health care is the systematic review, a process that involves identifying, judging, and summarizing evidence on a particular clinical question. An excellent article appeared in the April issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association, devoted entirely to describing how systematic reviews are conducted and identifying some systematic reviews that have b...

UNLABELLED Systematic reviews are structured reviews that use scientific strategies to reduce bias in the collection, appraisal, and interpretation of relevant studies. We undertook a systematic review of published systematic reviews in perioperative medicine to summarize the areas currently covered by this type of literature, to evaluate the quality of systematic reviews in this field, and to ...

Background: In 40-80% of children undergoing chemotherapy, oral mucositis is an acute complication which imposes significant financial and physical burdens on patients. In this article, a systematic review of published studies is conducted to investigate the role of nursing intervention in reducing oral mucositis. Materials and methods: This systematic review investigated, critically appraised...

BACKGROUND We completed a scoping review on the barriers and facilitators to use of systematic reviews by health care managers and policy makers, including consideration of format and content, to develop recommendations for systematic review authors and to inform research efforts to develop and test formats for systematic reviews that may optimise their uptake. METHODS We used the Arksey and ...