Review articles are often commissioned or submitted for publication in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care.Review papers summarise current knowledge and often attempt to reconcile conflicting scientific results from individual primary studies.As such, they are an essential resource for busy practitioners and researchers who struggle to keep up with the accumulating, ever-increasing body of evidence.However, many review manuscripts submitted to the Journal are based upon expert opinion rather than objective, systematic appraisal of the literature.The aim of this paper is to highlight the strength of a systematic review approach to reviewing the literature over traditional narrative reviews.In addition, this paper also makes the distinction between systematic reviews and meta-analysis.Regardless of the research question, practitioners should adopt a systematic approach to literature searching, critical appraisal and interpretation of data from primary studies.This paper outlines the crucial steps for consideration and acts as a guide for practitioners conducting reviews in family planning and reproductive health.These criteria may be considered specific to reviews of therapeutic interventions adopting a randomised controlled trial (RCT) design.However, this standard approach can be adopted and modified for reviews addressing different questions and/or study designs, e.g.evaluation of observational studies, diagnostic and screening tests 1 or prognostic variables.2 Additionally, the criteria outlined in this paper should enable Journal readers to develop a critical approach to reading published systematic reviews. What is a systematic review?A systematic review is a critical synthesis of research evidence, which involves analysis of all available and relevant evidence in a systematic, objective and robust manner.A formal, rigorous methodological process is followed (Figure 1).This includes clarification of the research question, identification of eligible literature using electronic bibliographic databases and other information sources, assessment of study quality, data extraction, summarising and interpretation of results.A common misconception is that systematic reviews can only be conducted on RCTs.Systematic review methodology can be adapted to address a wide range of questions and the study design of the included studies will be dictated by the research question.In the 1970s, Archie Cochrane highlighted the lack of critical summaries for use by health care professionals involved in decision making.3 This led to the development of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international network of health care professionals who prepare and update systematic reviews.Many other research groups and organisations conduct and produce systematic reviews [e.g.National Health Service Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (NHS CRD), National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE)].Systematic reviews use objective, explicit and transparent methods, which allow the reader to follow how conclusions were reached.They may indicate that further primary research is required in areas where no evidence exists or if current evidence is inconclusive.Findings from systematic reviews are used to inform health care policy decisions and practice-based recommendations based on available evidence. Terminology: systematic review and meta-analysisA systematic review may or may not incorporate a metaanalysis, depending upon whether statistical 'pooling' of results is appropriate or feasible.Meta-analysis is a quantitative method for combining the results of several independent studies that measure the same outcome so that an overall summary statistic can be calculated.Therefore, the term systematic review is not synonymous with the term meta-analysis.Whereas a systematic review may provide an overview of whether an intervention works, a systematic review with meta-analysis would provide an estimate of the magnitude of effect for that particular EVIDENCE-BASED REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH
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