Review Guidance

Paper Selection

The search strategy may return hundreds or even thousands of results, many of which will be duplicates (removed first) and irrelevant to the review. Therefore, a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria need to be created for all reviewers to compare results against.

The criteria can be represented in a decision tree as shown below. On the inclusion criteria side, each search result is compared to the inclusion criteria items. If it fails to meet even one of the criteria items, it is rejected. The remaining papers are tentatively included. Then, on the exclusion criteria side, each search result is compared to the exclusion criteria items. If it meets any of the criteria items, it is rejected.

In order to perform the selection, a simple worksheet can be created with columns for each criteria item.

Template:

The final selection process can be summarized using a flow diagram like below. It is read from top to bottom with the total set of returned results at the top and the final number of selected papers at the bottom. Arrows pointing to the center line indicate where more papers were added into the process while arrows pointing away from the center line indicate where papers were removed.

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Search Strategy
Paper Selection
Quality Assessment
Data Extraction and Synthesis