Handbooks & Manuals

• AHRQ Methods Guide for Effectiveness and Comparative Effectiveness Reviews Guidelines on conducting systematic reviews of effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, comparative harms, and medical tests.

• Campbell Collaboration The Campbell Collaboration is an international social science research network that produces high quality, open and policy-relevant evidence syntheses, plain language summaries and policy briefs.

Guidelines for producing a Campbell Systematic Review. Look for the Methodological Expectations of Campbell Collaboration Intervention Reviews (MECCIR) documents on this page.

Campbell Systematic Reviews: Author Guidelines :Designed to inform author teams about the requirements for Campbell evidence syntheses, guidelines for producing them, and selected sources of further information about systematic reviews that is consistent with those requirements and guidelines. 

• Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews Provides the core methodology for undertaking systematic reviews on the effects of health interventions, with an emphasis on reviewing randomized trials. Provides authors with a detailed account of the steps from starting a review to summarizing and interpreting the review findings.

Cochrane MECIR Manual Key aspects of Cochrane Handbook guidance are collated as the Methodological Expectations for Cochrane Intervention Reviews (MECIR). These provide core standards that are generally expected of Cochrane reviews. Each MECIR item includes a link to a relevant Handbook chapter.

• Finding What Works in Health Care: Standards for Systematic Reviews Standards for systematic reviews of effectiveness of therapeutic and surgical interventions. Covers the entire systematic review process (searching, screening, selecting studies, synthesizing the findings (including meta-analysis), assessing the overall quality of the body of evidence, and reporting the results.

Institute of Medicine. (2011). Finding what works in health care: Standards for systematic reviews. The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/13059.

• JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis Designed to provide authors with a comprehensive guide to conducting JBI systematic reviews. It describes in detail the process of planning, undertaking and writing up a systematic review using JBI methods. The JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis should be used in conjunction with the support and tutorials offered at the JBI SUMARI Knowledge Base

• Systematic Reviews: CRD's Guidance for Undertaking Reviews in Health Care Presents independent guidance produced by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD), University of York. The methods and steps necessary to conduct a systematic review are presented in a core chapter (Chapter 1).