What's a Systematic Review?
Overview
A review of the literature is one of the most important tools that practitioners access to determine the efficacy of a particular social work intervention. Unfortunately, traditional reviews of the literature are often vulnerable to bias. Many reviews discuss only those studies which support the author's viewpoint and disregard important studies which provide opposing conclusions. With traditional types of reviews, the less one knows about the literature in a field, the harder it is to decide whether the author has been thorough and whether the conclusions are impartial. The systematic review was created to provide "one stop shopping" for busy practitioners who want to see all the evidence for and against an intervention summarized in one objective review article. It is the best source for quickly understanding the research in order to better inform one's practice.
What is a Systematic Review
Each systematic review provides a comprehensive and evenhanded review, appraisal and synthesis of all the research evaluating a particular intervention. In contrast to more traditional literature reviews, systematic reviews follow a rigorous scientific methodology to minimize bias in article selection and in the interpretation of findings. Each stage of the process is clearly described in great detail and thus the conclusions are reproducible. For example, authors will identify the electronic databases searched and all keywords used to locate studies.
Systematic reviews often include a pooling together of many well-designed smaller studies (e.g. randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to provide a summary measure of a particular intervention's effectiveness. This careful pooling of results using statistical strategies is called meta-analysis. Conclusions drawn from such a pooling of data are much more likely to be statistically reliable and valid and thus, extremely helpful to inform policy and practice.
The concept and methodology of systematic reviews was developed by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international group of health care researchers and practitioners who are working to provide comprehensive assessment of the efficacy of almost every type of health care intervention. The reviews conducted by the Cochrane Collaboration focus solely on randomised controlled trials. This collaboration spawned the Campbell collaboration which focuses on the efficacy of interventions in social work, education and criminology. The interdisciplinary nature of social work research and the reality of working with vulnerable populations in the context of their communities results in a lack of true randomized controlled trials. Thus, systematic reviews in social work consider a wider range of evidence than is included in the Cochrane Collaboration.
by Esme Fuller-Thomson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Work
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