[A guide to obtain validity and reproducibility in systematic reviews]

Abstract

Validity and reproducibility are key concepts in the execution and reporting of the literature searches underlying a systematic review as it enables the reader to assess the quality of the performed searches. However, often the reporting of searches is lacking crucial information. This article provides guidelines for the process from development of a search protocol to quality assessment of the retrieved literature in order to obtain validity and reproducibility. The concepts of recall and precision are introduced to enable quality assessment of the literature searches.