Systematic reviews: How many articles to review?

Systematic reviews

The advice that nobody taught you👂

If you are about to embark on the world of systematic reviews, you will probably have flooded your mind with information from courses that are not at all practical. This is because nothing can replace better learning how to conduct a systematic review than getting down to business.

If you follow the traditional method of analysis, you will have to keep trying and failing with your search algorithm, until you get a number of articles that are feasible for you or your team to analyze.

To do this, start by asking yourself an unexplored PICO (Patient/Population; Intervention; Comparison; Outcomes) question, and perform a search in one or more databases, using linked terms following the guidelines of boolean logic (AND, OR...) and parentheses.

But I've gotten thousands of results!😯

After your boolean search, and after filtering out duplicate publications and articles you missed that do not meet your requirements for date, article type, keywords in your algorithm, or are not related to your systematic question, you are probably still left with a lot of articles that would take a long time to read or analyze.

What can we do?🙇

In that case, you have no choice but to be more restrictive in your question or in your flowchart filter. Here are some examples:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303519931_a_systematic_review_and_meta-analysis_of_perioperative_oral_decontamination/figures?lo=1

https://documentation.cochrane.org/revman-kb/prisma-flow-diagrams-95420733.html

How many publications should I have left to review after filtering?

👉If answering your question requires a deep reading of the articles, it is normal to have fewer than 20 or even fewer than 10 articles left to analyze after filtering.

👉Obviously, this is not a rule. It depends on the number of authors available to work on analyzing the articles filtered into your publication. In my experience, 10-20 articles to read in detail is the most one person can handle (keep in mind that these peer review processes are fast and you do not want your publication to go out of style💣).


J.

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