If you are considering doing a systematic review or meta-analysis, it is highly recommended that you utilize established, tested guidelines or standards to govern the way that you conduct and report your review. Use of these tools helps determine your methodology, process to assess and report on bias, tools used to conduct the review, and helps ensure consistent, structured, and reproducible systematic review searching and reporting.
Different professional organizations, publishers, or scholarly groups have created handbooks and guidelines that can be utilized (depending on your intended output) to determine the methodological approach to your systematic review. Selected guidelines are available on this page; however, if you are unable to find a guideline or standard to fit your review questions, please contact a librarian for assistance.
These standards are for systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research of therapeutic medical or surgical interventions.
Report at a Glance: Standards for Systematic Reviews (2011)
Finding What Works in Healthcare: Standards for Systematic Reviews (2011)
These standards are for systematic reviews in environmental science.
PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. PRISMA focuses on the reporting of reviews evaluating randomized trials, but can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions.
Designed for authors and editors of Cochrane Reviews, but equally useful for anyone conducting systematic reviews, it describes the methods and best practices in planning, conducting and interpretation of systematic reviews to inform decision-making around the use of health and healthcare interventions. Revised from cover to cover since the last major update in 2008, the Handbook reflects current best practice based on the latest methods research, and provides the only such comprehensive guide to conducting systematic reviews of interventions for both new and experienced authors.
The Campbell Collaboration is an international network publishing high quality, transparent and policy-relevant evidence syntheses and maps in the social sectors. Campbell is also a leading actor in evidence synthesis methods, producing guides and discussion papers for researchers interested in the field of methodology and evidence synthesis generally.