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Nursing: Systematic Reviews

A guide for students in the CSUF Nursing program.

About systematic Reviews

A systematic review summarises the results of available carefully designed healthcare studies (controlled trials) and provides a high level of evidence on the effectiveness of healthcare interventions. Judgments may be made about the evidence and inform recommendations for healthcare.

These reviews are complicated and depend largely on what clinical trials are available, how they were carried out (the quality of the trials) and the health outcomes that were measured. Review authors pool numerical data about effects of the treatment through a process called meta-analyses. Then authors assess the evidence for any benefits or harms from those treatments. In this way, systematic reviews are able to summarise the existing clinical research on a topic.

-Cochrane Library (n.d.) What is a systematic review? https://consumers.cochrane.org/what-systematic-review

Systematic Review resources