Systematic Reviews
Stages of a systematic review
These are the general stages that you would undertake during a systematic review - a systematic literature review may not undertake all these stages.
- Scoping searches, identify review questions, write the protocol
- Literature searching
- Screening titles and abstracts
- Obtaining papers
- Selecting full-text papers
- Quality assessment
- Data extraction
- Analysis and synthesis
- Writing up and editing
Timescale of a systematic review
Planning and conducting a systematic review can be a considerably time intensive research project.
How long the overall review will take depends on the scope of the review, size and availability of the review team.
A well-designed systematic review may take a year or more to complete.
The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions gives the following table indicating the estimated time for each element of a systematic review.
| Month | Activity |
| 1 - 2 | Preparation of protocol |
| 3 - 8 | Searches for published and unpublished studies |
| 2 - 3 | Pilot test of eligibility criteria |
| 3 - 8 | Inclusion assessments |
| 3 | Pilot test 'Risk of bias' assessment |
| 3 - 10 | Validity assessments |
| 3 | Pilot test of data collection |
| 3 - 10 | Data collection |
| 3 - 10 | Data entry |
| 5 - 11 | Follow up of missing information |
| 8 - 10 | Analysis |
| 1 - 11 | Preparation of review report |
| 12 - | Keeping the review up-to-date |