Screening titles/abstracts, reviewing full text, and reporting results: Part I

Screening is an elimination process that is done through the review of article titles and abstracts to determine if the study described meets any of the exclusion criteria. Exclusion criteria are developed based on the systematic review aims and objectives; each title and abstract is read and judged based on those criteria.  If the title/abstract meet a single exclusion criterion, it is eliminated.  Unfortunately, the potential for bias is high if the screeners are not blinded to article authors or journal titles and they are unduly influenced by either or both.  Additionally, there are many elements that need to be tracked resulting in the potential for inaccurate data.  Full text article review, on the other hand, is both an inclusion and an exclusion process.  Each article is reviewed to determine if the study it describes contains the elements required by the aims and objectives of the systematic review. Lastly, key elements must be reported on in the methods section and the results section of a systematic review.  Brevity is essential to ensure that the space required for analysis and discussion are not unduly impacted upon by the methods section. During this portion, participants will have an opportunity to work through the process of developing exclusion criteria based on aims, recording the exclusion criteria in the Excel systematic review workbook, and screening a small set of titles/abstracts. Participants will pair up to calculate Cohen's kappa and report on their findings based on published guidelines.