Research Guides: Systematic Reviews and Related Evidence Syntheses: Standards & Guidelines

Types of standards and guidelines

There are 2 main types of standards and guidelines:

conducting- how to do a review
reporting- how to report a review

Some standards can apply to most disciplines while others were created for a specific area. Reviews methods and frameworks has been applied to a wide variety of disciplines.

Conducting Standards

Methodological Expectations of Cochrane Intervention Reviews
From the Cochrane Collaboration, these guidelines have both conducting and reporting guidelines for the protocol and for the review, and for updating reviews
Scoping Reviews (JBI)
Peters MDJ, Godfrey C, McInerney P, Munn Z, Tricco AC, Khalil, H. Chapter 11: Scoping Reviews (2020 version). In: Aromataris E, Munn Z (Editors). JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis, JBI, 2020. Available from https://synthesismanual.jbi.global. https://doi.org/10.46658/JBIMES-20-12
SRs of Qualitative Evidence
Lockwood C, Porritt K, Munn Z, Rittenmeyer L, Salmond S, Bjerrum M, Loveday H, Carrier J, Stannard D. Chapter 2: Systematic reviews of qualitative evidence. In: Aromataris E, Munn Z (Editors). JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis. JBI, 2020. Available from https://synthesismanual.jbi.global. https://doi.org/10.46658/JBIMES-20-03

Reporting standards

PRISMA 2020 Statement
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses is an international standard for reporting reviews that has been adopted by hundreds of biomedical journals
PRISMA-P
PRISMA for protocols
PRISMA-Search
PRISMA-Searching focuses on the transparency and reproducibility of searching methods and results
PRISMA-Scoping
PRISMA Scoping standard for reporting scoping reviews