Be sure to reference reporting standards when writing your review. This helps ensure that you communicate essential components of your methods, results, and conclusions. There are a number of tools that can be used to ensure compliance with reporting guidelines.
Sections of a Systematic Review Manuscript
Systematic reviews follow the same structure as original research articles, but you will need to report on your search instead of on details like the participants or sampling. Sections of your manuscript are shown as bold headings in the PRISMA checklist.
| Title |
Describe your manuscript and state whether it is a systematic review, meta-analysis, or both. |
| Abstract |
Structure the abstract and include (as applicable): background, objectives, data sources, study eligibility criteria, participants, interventions, quality assessment and synthesis methods, results, limitations, conclusions, implications of key findings, and systematic review registration number. |
| Introduction |
Describe the rationale for the review and provide a statement of questions being addressed. |
| Methods |
Include details regarding the protocol, eligibility criteria, databases searched, full search strategy of at least one database (often reported in appendix), and the study selection process. Describe how data were extracted and analyzed. If a librarian is part of your research team, that person may be best suited to write this section. |
| Results |
Report the numbers of articles screened at each stage using a PRISMA diagram. Include information about included study characteristics, risk of bias (quality assessment) within studies, and results across studies. |
| Discussion |
Summarize main findings, including the strength of evidence and limitations of the review. Provide a general interpretation of the results and implications for future research. |
| Funding |
Describe any sources of funding for the systematic review. |
| Appendix |
Include entire search strategy for at least one database in the appendix (include search strategies for all databases searched for more transparency). |