Back to: Prepare Your Systematic Review Topic

Analytic frameworks help you map and communicate your research design, decisions and priorities.

Let’s start with the basics. If you had just one research question and you found plenty of studies that answered that question directly, your analytic framework would look pretty boring:

This analytic framework says you’re looking at how a specific population, let’s say teenage boys, responds to an intervention, such as a new acne medication. The arrow indicates that your systematic review will examine the relationship between the intervention (acne medication) and the final outcome you care about (decrease in acne within a week) .

In this case, you probably wouldn’t even bother drawing an analytic framework. It’s pretty obvious what you’re going to do.