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. 2022 Aug 15;1(Suppl 2):100128.
doi: 10.1016/j.inpm.2022.100128. eCollection 2022.

Systematic reviews: Not always a pain

Alexandra E Fogarty  1 , Aaron Conger  2 , Taylor Burnham  2
Affiliations

Systematic reviews: Not always a pain

Alexandra E Fogarty et al. Interv Pain Med. .

Abstract

Systematic reviews analyze the evidence surrounding a specific intervention within a population. High quality systematic reviews can help clinicians and policymakers accurately understand a treatment intervention. This article outlines the basic principles of systematic review development, including assembling a research team, defining the research question, publishing a protocol, designing and executing the search, study selection, extracting the data, assessing risk of bias, synthesizing the data and conducting a certainty assessment. In addition, we will address common pitfalls and highlight special considerations for the field of interventional pain medicine. Understanding systematic review methodology will help investigators improve their primary research and in turn, better primary literature will improve the value of high quality reviews.

Keywords: Interventional pain; Methodology; Systematic review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Fundamental steps for designing and performing a systematic review.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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