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

What Are Conducting and Reporting Standards?

There are two main types of standards and guidelines used in systematic reviews:

Conducting — how to plan, structure, and execute a review
Reporting — how to document and present the completed review

Some standards are broad and apply across disciplines, while others are designed for specific fields such as health sciences, education, or social policy. As review methodologies evolve, many standards are now applied across diverse disciplines.

Conducting Standards

Methodological Expectations of Cochrane Intervention Reviews (MECIR)
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