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Systematic & Scoping Review Support at the Main Library

Your Librarian

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Elizabeth Kline
Contact:
Main Library A403
(520) 621-7209

Process of a review

Systematic Review Process:

Evidence syntheses projects (including systematic and scoping reviews) are labor intensive.  

Writing the systematic review protocol may take 2-6 months and completing and writing a systematic review may take 1-2 years.( Cochrane Collaboration, Cochrane Community, Review Production. Time and Commitment.)  

A study of registered systematic review protocols found that the mean time taken to complete a systematic review was 1.5 years. (Borah, R., Brown, A., Capers, P., & Kaiser, K. (2017). Analysis of the time and workers needed to conduct systematic reviews of medical interventions using data from the PROSPERO registry. BMJ Open, 7(2), E012545.)

A study on scoping reviews found a mean time of 5.2 months to complete a scoping review, while the high of the range was over 1.5 years.  (Pham, M., Rajić, A., Greig, J., Sargeant, J., Papadopoulos, A., & McEwen, S. (2014). A scoping review of scoping reviews: Advancing the approach and enhancing the consistency. Research Synthesis Methods, 5(4), 371-385.)

  • PredicTER is an open-source tool that can help you plan, predict, and schedule your work

Timeline of a review

 

Steps in traditional systematic review Estimated time investment
1. Assemble evidence synthesis review team and select project manager Varies
2. Identify appropriate review methodology 2 weeks
3. Define research question 2 weeks
4. Define inclusion/exclusion criteria 1 week
5. Select databases 1 week
6. Select grey literature resources 1 week
7. Write search strategy for "master" database

1 week
8. Write and register protocol (written compilation of previous steps) Varies
9. Translate search strategy to syntax of all databases (including grey literature) 2 weeks
10. Search and export results into citation management software  2 weeks
11. De-duplicate results 2-4 weeks
12. Title and abstract screening  2-3 months*
13. Retrieve full-text articles 1 month*
14. Full-text screening 2-3 months*
15. Risk-of-bias assessment 2-3 months
16. Data extraction 2-3 months
17. Meta-analysis or synthesis of results 2-3 months
18. Write the manuscript 2-3 months

*Time frame can vary significantly depending on the number of citations identified during screening

Steps and estimated time informed by Cornell University Library