The Aim and Scope of a Systematic Review: A Logical Approach

The systematic review process is one where each decision has a rationale and is informed by those who have gone before. The problem leads to a question, the question informs the search, and the inclusion and exclusion criteria define which papers should be included. Decisions made even in the very early stages of the process will continue to affect the whole review process and the eventual outcome, so care is needed at every stage. Transparency of decision-making is key; readers need to know both what the reviewer has done and what the rationale was. Different people will approach a review question in their own way, there is not usually a single right or wrong way to undertake a review; although there are definitely things to avoid. This chapter looks at some of the key early decisions such as types of review question and important issues in developing searches and inclusion criteria. It also introduces some of the tools and standards that are used in systematic reviewing. Logic is the basis of science. It is the process by which we evaluate arguments that allow us to come to a conclusion and so make sense of the world. By arguments here we don’t mean people debating or disagreeing with each other, but rather a group of statements that act as the premises which provide support for subsequent conclusions (Hurley. A concise introduction to logic. 11th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. 707 p., 2012). As a systematic reviewer, you are judged not just on the outcome of your review, but also the process that you went through to achieve that outcome. Although writing a systematic review is often a linear process, as we will see when discussing qualitative reviews sometimes there are iterative approaches to analysis. For the moment we will think about this as a linear process though, where each decision leads to an outcome that informs the next.