Back to: Prepare Your Systematic Review Topic

Where do you look? Here are a few places:

PROSPERO: A registry of planned, ongoing and completed systematic reviews. If you eventually conduct a review yourself, you can register your protocol here too.

The Cochrane Collaboration : An international non-profit organization devoted to conducting systematic reviews and encouraging the use of evidence based medicine. You can search the Cochrane library for related systematic reviews.

The DARE database: The Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) offers access to

Tens of thousands of systematic reviews of health and social care interventions

Summaries of all Cochrane systematic reviews and protocols up to March 2015

Over 17,000 economic evaluations of health and social care interventions

The Department of Health and the National Institute for Health Research stopped funding this database in 2015, so DARE is no longer adding new records, but the archives will be available until at least 2021.

PubMed Systematic Review Filter : You might already use PubMed to search for academic studies, but did you know that PubMed has a filter to help you find systematic reviews? Click here to learn more about how to use the filter.

Ok, so you’ve looked for systematic reviews related to your topic and so far no one has addressed your specific area of interest.

On the next page, we’ll talk about how to quickly survey the existing research about your topic to determine whether there is enough evidence to start your own systematic review.