Basics of Systematic Reviews

A protocol is a detailed plan that outlines the design of your systematic review.  Never start the searching process before creating a protocol.  When writing a protocol, you will:

• Describe the rationale/objectives for conducting the systematic review
• List the PI and team members
• Define the eligibility criteria you'll use to screen the literature
• Decide which databases you'll be searching
• Key terms that will be used in the literature search (ideally, a full search strategy for at least 1 database).
• Explain if you're searching both published and unpublished literature (and grey literature)
• Explain how you'll be extracting data from eligible articles.
  • Data items that will be extracted.
• Describe the quality assessment tool(s) you'll use to evaluate the literature.

Finally, you'll upload your protocol to a registry to make it publicly available.

While the PRISMA 2020 Checklist (as mentioned in the Pre-Review Tasks) describes the components you should include in the review, the PRISMA-P checklist contains 17 items that are considered essential components of a protocol.  You can review and download the PRISMA-P checklist for protocols below:

In the spirit of transparency and reproducibility, core tenets of Open Science practices, you should make your protocol visible and available to others by uploading it to a registry.  If you plan to publish your protocol in a journal, make sure to check the protocol requirements on the journal website before submitting.

Where to register your systematic review protocol:

https://library.ccny.cuny.edu/PublicHealth/litreviews