What is it?

: Systematic Review (SR) is the methods involving in “a detailed and comprehensive plan and search strategy derived a priori, with the goal of reducing bias by identifying, appraising, and synthesizing all relevant studies on a particular topic.” (Uman, 2011)

What’s the benefits?

1) You can develop your gateway paper into a publication or conference paper.

: The first milestone, gateway review, comprises of narrative review and critical review. Usually it is hard to publish paper using narrative review, but SR become more acceptable in academia because of its replicability, comprehensiveness, and planned approach.

2) You can deepen your understanding of the topic for your doctoral study by experiencing this exhaustive literature review process.

: Based on the clear guideline, you can conduct exhaustive and critical review about theoretical framework, methodological features and quality, and/or main results. Therefore, this research experience help you elaborate research opportunity and problem .

3) You can take advantage of the established framework for SR.

: SR necessitates, by its nature, the framework developed by research community. Luckily, the very research community developed clear guidelines (e.g., PRISMA; see https://prisma-statement.org/) and is expanding SR guideline to qualitative and theoretical review.

Prerequisite?

– You should have a very procedural and detail-oriented mind.

– It is encouraged to find a collaborator to objectify your coding process (extracting features of articles).

– You should know well the methodology and research design of the article you want to analyze in SR.

Reference

Uman, L. S. (2011). Systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 20(1), 57.

Written by YangHyun Kim (ykim39@albany.edu)