BACKGROUND The systematic review is becoming an increasingly popular and established research method in public health. Obtaining systematic review skills are therefore becoming a common requirement for most public health researchers and practitioners. However, most researchers still remain apprehensive about conducting their first systematic review. This is often because an 'ideal' type of syst...

BACKGROUND Overviews of reviews (overviews) compile data from multiple systematic reviews to provide a single synthesis of relevant evidence for decision-making. Despite their increasing popularity, there is limited methodological guidance available for researchers wishing to conduct overviews. The objective of this scoping review is to identify and collate all published and unpublished documen...

background recently there has been a significant increase in the number of systematic reviews addressing questions of prevalence. key features of a systematic review include the creation of an a priori protocol, clear inclusion criteria, a structured and systematic search process, critical appraisal of studies, and a formal process of data extraction followed by methods to synthesize, or combin...

The Cochrane Collaboration says that the Cochrane handbook for diagnostic test accuracy reviews (DTAR) is currently in development as per the Cochrane Collaboration. This implies that the methodology of systematic reviews (SR) of diagnostic test accuracy is still a matter of debate. At this point, comparison of methodologies for SR in case of interventions as against diagnostics would be helpfu...

Background. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is widely applied in the clinical practice of neck pain owing to cervical radiculopathy (CR). While many systematic reviews exist in CAM to improve CR, research is distributed across population, intervention, comparison, and setting. Objective. This overview aims to summarize the characteristics and evaluate critically the evidence from s...