2003-05-02 Reviewing the evidence - Where do you start?

Are you a health professional who wishes to undertake reviews. Reviews provide summaries of evidence contained in a number of studies. We like reviews, they are a quick way of keeping up to date without the effort of having to read widely and appraise a large body of literature. You may want to do a review yourself? You may be undertaking research, presenting at a conference, be a physician taking a Royal College exam, you may wish to include a review of literature as part of your Personal Development Plan or indeed you may be running a journal club. How do you go about gathering the literature and making sense of what you are reading? Drawn together by four authors who are veterans of systematic reviews, this book will take you throught he process of first framing the right question identifying the relevant literature, assessing the quality of the literature, summarizing the evidence and then interpreting the findings. As inevitably some of the chapters have some difficult concepts for the new reviewer, there are four very different case studies. These studies will help you through the potential minefield of reviewing a large body of literature and this section of the book is possibly, for the novice reviewer worth reading first as it gives a great overview of how to tackle a review. Concise tables directing the reader to the best databases around and detailed website addresses can be found in the introduction. For the experienced reviewer a more detailed look at reviewing can be found in the earlier chapters with a comprehensive glossary written in a way that is understandable and easily accessible .
Any review is only as good as the literature that it reviews - the so called ' Achilles heel' behind the conclusions. Take a step back from the protocols and recommendations that land on your desk - are they in fact based on credible literature. By reading this book first you will be in a position to assess those recommendations in a comprehensive way.