Managing and reporting
Quality assessment and meta-analysis
Quality assessment
Quality assessment, also known as critical appraisal, is the next step in your knowledge synthesis journey. After the screening process is complete, you can evaluate the included articles for inconsistencies or biases.
Types of bias that you want to avoid in your systematic review include:
- Publication bias: the publication or non-publication of research findings based on the results
- Citation bias: citing or not citing research findings
- Outcome reporting bias: selectively reporting outcomes of a study based on the nature or direction of results
Questions you should consider when conducting your Qualitative Assessment of an article, include:
- Was the study performed according to the original protocol?
- Were statistical analyses performed correctly?
- Do the data justify the conclusions?
- Are there any conflicts of interest?
The Joanna Briggs Institute has a checklist and list of software that will help guide you in evaluating your selected studies for any inconsistences or biases.
Meta-analysis
As part of your systematic review, you can conduct a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a statistical method where the results of two or more studies are combined. The objective of conducting a meta-analysis as part of your systematic review is to quantitatively compare the effectiveness of one intervention to another; it objectively summarizes and synthesizes the results of your included studies. It is important to note that conducting a meta-analysis may not be appropriate for all systematic reviews, since there may not be sufficient research and evidence in that domain or for that topic.
For more information on conducting meta-analysis, see: Knowledge syntheses: Systematic & Scoping Reviews, and other review types (University of Toronto Libraries).
