How to Conduct a Systematic Review: Best Practices for Academic Research

A systematic review is one of the major types of reviews conducted in research, involving a formal and systematic approach. Students in the medical, public health, and other fields use this type of review to synthesize available evidence and evaluate its quality.

The systematic review writing process can be time- and energy-consuming, which, understandably, is why many students prefer to hire a ghostwriter. Keep reading this article as we show you how to conduct a systematic review in your academic research paper.

The Steps of Systematic Review: Structuring Your Review

To perform a systematic review, you’ll need a specific question, a team (at least three people), journal archives, time, writing, and statistical tools. Once you have these ready, follow the steps below to write a systematic review:

1. Formulating the Research Question

The first and, arguably, most important step in creating a systematic review is to formulate your research question. Your research question should be such that you can easily and effectively communicate your findings to other practitioners and researchers. Furthermore, a clear research question is one that guides every decision you make during this writing process. To formulate your research question, consider the population or problem, intervention, comparison, outcome, and study design.

2. Create Your Research Plan

The next step is to develop a protocol that contains your research plan for the review. It is very easy to overlook this step, but it is highly important because it reduces bias and ensures efficiency.

Furthermore, your research protocol should include the background information on the research question, research objectives, and proposed methods. Moreover, your proposed methods should include your selection criteria, search strategy, and details of what information you’ll gather and how you’ll analyze it.

3. Get Relevant Sources

This is perhaps the most exhausting and time-consuming step in the systematic review writing process. Yet, if you want to write an unbiased review, you have to get as many relevant studies as possible. Meanwhile, how you search for these studies will depend on your research question and field. Nevertheless, generally, you can get resources through databases, hand-searching relevant journals or conference proceedings, gray literature, and experts’ accounts.

Gray literature includes those documents produced by institutions, including your and other institutions as well as government parastatals. Also, you can get theses written by graduate students; these are also important gray literature you can use in your work.

4. Your Selection Criteria

The next step is to apply your selection criteria; you will need two other people for this. Three people work to apply the selection criteria. Here, two are reading studies independently, and the third person is breaking ties. But, before starting a systematic review selection criteria application, ensure everyone understands it first.

On the other hand, if it’s an assignment and not a research paper, you may not need a team. Instead, you can apply these criteria on your own, but be sure to mention this as a limitation in your discussion. Meanwhile, when applying these criteria, base it on the following:

• Titles and abstracts – use the information in the abstract to decide if the article meets the selection criteria, and
• Full texts – Read the articles you didn’t exclude from the beginning of the research and decide which ones meet the criteria

5.Extract Your Data

The next step is to systematically collect information from the selected studies. This should include information on the study’s methods and results. Although it depends on your research question, this information would typically include:

• The year
• Research findings
• Sample size
• Study design
• Context
• Conclusions

Furthermore, you need to get information about your judgment on the quality of the evidence available.

6.    Synthesize Your Data

Next, gather the information you’ve collected together to form one cohesive story. You can use the narrative or quantitative approach here. As much as possible, try using both approaches – unless there’s not enough data. In that case, the narrative approach is more ideal. If you use the narrative approach, state why the quantitative approach is unnecessary.

7.    Write Your Report

You’re done with your review and are ready to publish the answer to your research question and how you arrived at it. Your systematic review report should have

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusion

Conclusion

Writing a systematic review can be challenging for many students at different levels. This is why academic writing tips like these are vital. The essence of a systematic review is to answer a well-formulated research question. It is also vital to state in clear terms the research methods used.