Systematic Reviews

Describes in detail the process of preparing and maintaining Cochrane systematic reviews on the effects of healthcare interventions.

Standards for the entire systematic review process, from locating, screening, and selecting studies for the review, to synthesizing the findings (including meta-analysis) and assessing the overall quality of the body of evidence, to producing the final review report.

PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in published reviews. The PRISMA checklist guides authors through the development, reporting and publishing of review articles. The checklist states what elements to include in the title, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, and funding sections of a review article. If authors follow the PRISMA checklist, then in their manuscript they can indicate that the review was “conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) Statement.”

Who should use PRISMA?
- Authors: PRISMA aims to help authors improve the reporting of literature reviews.
- Journal peer reviewers and editors: PRISMA is useful for critical appraisal of the process and reporting of published reviews.

The checklist includes 16 reporting items related to how the literature searches should be conducted and reported.