How To Read A Systematic Review And/Or Meta-Analysis

A very important type of study to understand

Pictured: Coffee, but also a nice symbol for trying to find scientific studies on a topic and group them together. Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash

If you haven’t read part 1 of systematic reviews you can find it here. I’d recommend reading that first. I go into the history of the subject, and why you should care about this sort of scientific study. Now, on to the meat of the issue. If you come across a systematic review, what should you do?

In my opinion, there are two broad ways to interrogate a systematic review. The first is to look at elements of the review’s reliability — was it done according to basic guidelines, or did the authors miss important elements of the study’s reporting? Did the authors report the how and why of their methodology, or is it all very opaque? Can you tell which studies were excluded from the review and why they were dumped?

This is all important, and I’ll get to it in a second. However, I think it’s vital at the outset to be clear — the robustness of any systematic review is down to the studies that it includes. The only way to truly be certain that a review is on the level is to read all of the studies that the authors have collated and see for yourself how good the evidence really is. This makes interpreting these reviews quite challenging — you can understand the methodology and be pretty good at picking out flaws, but unless you can read and…