Duke Medical Center Library & Archives Blog
Tag: systematic reviews

Duke Medical Center Library & Archives offers an institutional site license for Covidence!

What is Covidence?
Web-based software platform designed to facilitate the systematic review process. It can also be used for other reviews and evidence synthesis projects. 

What does Covidence do?
 Assists with multiple steps in the systematic review process, including:

• Importing data from citation management tools like EndNote or databases
• Screening and selecting studies
• Resolving conflicts
• Extracting study data
• Assessing study quality/risk of bias
• Exporting data to multiple file types
• Creating PRISMA flow diagrams

How do I access Covidence?…

Categories: Explore Tools

Tags: covidence, systematic reviews

Many researchers say they want to conduct a systematic review, only to be dismayed by the amount of time, effort, skill, and teamwork required to pull off that feat. Even with time and a good team, the research question might not be best suited to systematic review methodology.

There are actually many other review methodologies that researchers can choose depending on their research question. We've put together a guide to make the distinctions between review types easier to understand and to help guide you in selecting the best methodology for your research question. Our guide includes links to helpful resources, including the newly updated …

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: systematic reviews

A systematic review attempts to collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question. The key characteristics of a systematic review are: a clearly defined question with inclusion and exclusion criteria; rigorous and systematic search of the literature; critical appraisal of included studies; data extraction and management; analysis and interpretation of results; and report for publication.

Not every research question fits well with the systematic review methodology. Other types of reviews might be better suited for research questions that are broader or that may not have much empirical evidence on the topic.

What does it take to do a systematic review?

• …

Tags: systematic reviews

A recent article in BMC Medical Research Methodology, Google Scholar as Replacement for Systematic Literature Searches: Good Relative Recall and Precision are Not Enough, reports that "Google Scholar is not ready as a professional searching tool for tasks where structured retrieval methodology is necessary." For more details about the study, including its methods and results, see the structured abstract below.

BACKGROUND:
Recent research indicates a high recall in Google Scholar searches for systematic reviews. These reports raised high expectations of Google Scholar as a unified and easy to use search interface. However, studies on the coverage of Google Scholar rarely used the search…

Tags: systematic reviews