Prospect of systematic review: strengths and limitations / 中华疾病控制杂志

ABSTRACT

As the core method of evidence-based medicine, systematic review comprehensively summarizes all the evidence of a particular problem. It enables clinicians, scientific researchers, and health policy makers to quickly obtain a great deal of comprehensive, accurate, and reliable information in a short time, and are crucial tools for them to keep up with rapidly evolving areas of medicine. Adequate systematic reviews integrate the evidence that is accumulating in a particular field to narrate the distance between research evidence and medical practice. However, in recent years, people are always questioning and criticizing systematic review. In this situation, we introduce the origin and concept of the system review briefly and elaborate the strengths and limitations of the system review in detail. Finally, on the basis of application and current situation of the systematic review, we describe the prospect of the systematic review. Even though the methodology of the systematic review has some limitations, it is still the most authoritative method for synthesizing all research evidence in a given field, because we have no better way. If the results of a systematic review of all studies are unreliable, there is no reason to say that the results of one or several of them are impartial or unbiased.