Steps in a review
Broadly, the key steps of most reviews include:
- developing a clearly defined review question with clear inclusion criteria
- identifying the best type of review and locating relevant guidelines
- developing a preliminary search to identify the need for the review and to identify starting (or seeding) articles
- developing a systematic search and running the search across multiple databases and information sources
- a two-step screening process:
- screening the title and abstracts of the results against the inclusion criteria
- screening full text of included titles and abstracts against the inclusion criteria
- assessing included studies for risk of bias (this depends on the review type)
- extracting relevant data from the included studies and synthesising as relevant (for example using a meta-analysis or a meta-synthesis)
- writing and publishing the review.
Note
Transparent reporting of the steps undertaken in your review enables readers to assess how well a review has been conducted and is important for reproducibility.
There are several reporting guidelines which are used in different reviews. PRISMA provides numerous reporting guidelines for systematic and scoping reviews, for reporting in protocols and for reporting search strategies.
Literature review modules
For further information and instructions on steps towards building a literature review please explore our Literature review modules.