Systematic Reviews: Rationale for systematic reviews

TLDR

Systematic literature reviews and meta‑analyses are essential for integrating vast amounts of information to support decision making by healthcare providers, researchers, and policymakers. They assess consistency and generalizability of findings, increase power and precision through meta‑analysis, and use explicit methods to reduce bias and improve reliability.

Abstract

Systematic literature reviews including meta-analyses are invaluable scientific activities. The rationale for such reviews is well established. Health care providers, researchers, and policy makers are inundated with unmanageable amounts of information; they need systematic reviews to efficiently integrate existing information and provide data for rational decision making. Systematic reviews establish whether scientific findings are consistent and can be generalised across populations, settings, and treatment variations, or whether findings vary significantly by particular subsets. Meta-analyses in particular can increase power and precision of estimates of treatment effects and exposure risks. Finally, explicit methods used in systematic reviews limit bias and, hopefully, will improve reliability and accuracy of conclusions.