Search results

Systematic reviews – that is, research reviews that are rigorous and follow scientific methods – are increasingly important for assisting stakeholders in implementing evidence-based decision making for children and adults with disabilities. Yet, systematic reviews vary greatly in quality and are therefore not a panacea. Distinguishing “good” reviews from “bad” reviews requires time and skills related to the appraisal of systematic reviews. The purpose of this chapter is to inform stakeholders (i.e., practitioners, administrators, policy makers) of evidence-based information sources that provide synopses (i.e., appraisals) of systematic reviews, to provide guidance in reading and interpreting the synopses of various sources, and to propose how to make sense of multiple synopses from different sources for the same systematic review. A secondary purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how stakeholders can conduct their own appraisals if synopses are not available.

This paper aims to assess the quality of systematic reviews on the effectiveness of psychological therapy for adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) and mental health difficulties.

Four electronic databases were used: Cochrane, PsycINFO, PubMed and Scopus. Studies were included if they were a systematic review focused primarily on psychological therapy for adults with ID and mental health difficulties. Systematic reviews focused on anger were also considered for inclusion. These reviews were rated for quality on the Amstar-2, a quality rating tool designed to evaluate systematic reviews.

Twelve relevant systematic reviews were identified, which included seven reviews focused primarily on cognitive behavioural therapy, two on psychodynamic therapy and three on third-wave therapies. The AMSTAR-2 indicated that all 12 reviews were of “critically low” quality. Thus, there are significant problems with the evidence base.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic review of systematic reviews of the effectiveness of psychological therapies for people who have ID. It provides an overview of the quality of the evidence base into one place.

Increased attention has been placed on identifying and installing evidence-based practices (EBPs) to effectively and efficiently serve students with and at-risk for learning and behavioral challenges. Council for Exceptional Children's (CEC, 2014) Standards for Evidence-Based Practices in Special Education are often used to examine a range of strategies, practices, and programs to ascertain if they are indeed EBPs. Systematic reviews conducted to evaluate the evidence base of these potential EBPs are important as they inform practice. We contend it is important to provide well-vetted procedures for training scholars to conduct systematic reviews with replicable precision. We offer this chapter to assist scholars in conducting systematic reviews to quality appraise the methodological rigor of a body of literature using the CEC Standards for EBPs. We focus on (1) project management considerations and (2) steps and phases to support the development and dissemination of high quality, methodologically rigorous systematic literature reviews.

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) is a widely accepted guideline for performing a systematic review (SR) in clinical journals. It not only helps an author to improve the reporting but also assists reviewers and editors in the critical appraisal of available SR. These tools help in achieving reproducibility in research, a major concern in contemporary academic research. But there is a lack of awareness about the approach among management researchers. This chapter attempts to fill this gap using a narrative review of reliable online resources and peer-reviewed articles to discuss the PRISMA guidelines and recent amendments. The chapter further points out the limitations of PRISMA in the review of management literature and suggests measures to overcome that. This piece of literature introduces a reader to the basics of a systematic review using PRISMA as an instrument. One of the significant contributions is to delineate a seven-step strategy to attain reproducibility in the systematic review. The chapter is useful for researchers and academicians in the field of social science and management.

Schools are an important setting for a wide variety of activities to promote health. The purpose of this paper is to map the different types of health promotion programmes and activities in schools, to estimate the amount of published evaluations of health promotion within UK schools, and to identify any provisional “candidate programme theories” to inform a planned theory-driven systematic review.

Review of reviews: in total, 67 published systematic reviews of health promotion in schools were identified, from which a sub-sample of 28 systematic reviews (on 14 health topics) were retrieved for more detailed reading.

Key dimensions of programme design and delivery fell mainly under the following categories: the problem and age-group of children targeted, who delivers the programme and how, and the scale and theoretical underpinning of the programme. Candidate programme theories spanned both effectiveness factors and aspects of programme implementation.

Few detailed “candidate theories” emerged for explaining how and why health promotion can more successfully implemented in different schools.

There are five or more systematic reviews of studies of health promotion programmes in schools which target: smoking prevention; physical activity; sexual health; emotional and behavioural health and well-being; mental health; substance abuse; obesity/overweight. This suggests probable duplication of health problem-specific systematic reviews.

The findings highlight the considerable diversity of health promotion in schools, and specifies key dimensions of this diversity. They underline the need to understand better how, why, and in what circumstances health promotion can be successfully implemented in different schools and education systems.

Effective literature searches are critical to researchers and health care professionals. To conduct literature searches, clinicians, researchers and nurses rely primarily on a few major databases (PubMed, Cochrane, CINAHL, etc.) to retrieve information. However, there is a lack of literature on the comparative efficiencies of major databases for systematic review results on a clinically related topic. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature.

Cochrane Handbook (2011) defines systematic review as a review of a clearly formulated question that uses systematic and explicit methods to identify, select and critically appraise relevant research and to collect and analyze data from the studies that are included in the review. In this paper, search results of systematic reviews on a clinical topic between two major databases – PubMed and Cochrane Library – are compared.

Searching within PubMed for key terms in the titles and abstracts of articles is important to include in any systematic review, in addition to searching Medical Subject Heading terms. After applying filters, PubMed retrieved 130 systematic reviews that matched the criteria. In Cochrane Library, the searches were performed on the chosen topic using Boolean and phrase searching: text field searches resulted in 251 reviews. The search was further narrowed by subject, which yielded 20 reviews. It is strongly recommended to use multiple health-care specialty databases, check for duplicate reviews in the results and not limit results to English-only publications.

This paper can be used to introduce new researchers and/or students to methods for conducting systematic reviews using two or more databases on a chosen topic.

This paper fills a gap in the literature regarding comparative efficiencies of major databases for systematic review results on clinically related topics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which a systematic review approach is transferable from medicine to multi-disciplinary studies in the built environment research.

Primarily a review paper, it focuses on specific steps in the systematic review to clarify and elaborate the elements for adapting an evidence base in the built environment studies particular to the impact of green building on employees’ health, well-being and productivity.

While research represents a potentially powerful means of reducing the gap between research and practice by applying tried and tested methods, the methodological rigour is debatable when a traditional systematic review approach is applied in the built environment studies involving multi-disciplinary research.

The foundational contribution of this paper lies in providing methodological guidance and an alternative framework to advance the longstanding efforts in the built environment to bridge the practitioner and academic divide.

A systematic review approach in the built environment is rare. The method is unique in multi-disciplinary studies especially in green building studies. This paper adopts the systematic review protocols in this cross-disciplinary study involving health, management and built environment expertise.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the methodology quality of the literature search protocols of systematic reviews and to assess the relevance of the search filter that applies PubMed for retrieving this type of publication of the MEDLINE database.

For the selection of the document type, a literature search about nutritional and metabolic diseases was carried out in MEDLINE and the PubMed filter was used for retrieving “Systematic Reviews”, selecting “Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases” from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database as Major Topic to determine the area of knowledge. Data analysis was carried out using “External Logistic Biplot”, a novel multivariate statistical technique in the field of medical documentation.

The results highlight the large variability of the methodology used in the literature search protocols of the systematic reviews analysed and confirm the low precision of the filter used by PubMed for the recovery of systematic reviews.

The Logistic Biplot used in this research allows an optimal categorization of the different documentary typologies and classifies the documents by their methodological quality, demonstrating its usefulness for the future development of the bibliometric analysis.

Purpose – The numbers of health care transparency initiatives are increasing. Despite the growing availability of quality data, there seems to be a shortage of evidence about the effects and effectiveness of such initiatives. The aim of this systematic review is to document the effects of transparency, defined as the public release of quality performance data, on hospital care outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach – Through a review of the literature, we chose 46 keywords to use in our searches and focused on empirical studies published in English between 2010 and 2015. The use of combinations of these keywords in searches of four databases (PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library) generated 13,849 publications. The removal of duplicates and exclusion of studies that were not empirical or not relevant to transparency and quality resulted in 39 studies to be reviewed.

Findings – Our review of the literature confirmed the growth of health care transparency efforts, led by the United States, and found mixed results regarding the effects of transparency on hospital care outcomes. For example, mortality, the most frequently researched performance measure (n = 15), exhibited this mixed pattern by having studies showing a reduction (n = 4), increase (n = 1), mixed findings (n = 4), and no significant relationship (n = 6) as a result of public release. We also found a limited number of articles related to unintended consequences of public reporting. When compared with earlier systematic reviews, there seems to be a trend in the reduction of unintended consequences. Therefore, we recommend exploration of this potential trend in future studies empirically.

Practical Implications – The research findings summarized in this systematic review can be used to understand the results of existing transparency efforts and to develop future transparency initiatives that may better enhance hospital quality performance.

Originality/value – This is the latest and most comprehensive systematic review summarizing the effects of transparency of quality metrics on hospital care outcomes.

This study aims to evaluate and summarize the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and internet-based CBT (ICBT) interventions on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD). CBT is one of the most used and suggested interventions to manage MDD, whereas ICBT is a novel effective proposed approach.

The review was conducted following the preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis protocol. A comprehensive and extensive search was performed to identify and evaluate the relevant studies about the effectiveness of CBT and ICBT on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among patients with MDD.

A total of eight research studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this systematic review. RCT studies were conducted to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of CBT and ICBT on relapse prevention and severity of symptoms among patients with MDD. It has been found that CBT is a well-supported and evidently based effective psychotherapy for managing depressive symptoms and reducing the relapse and readmission rate among patients diagnosed with MDD. The ICBT demonstrated greater improvements in depressive symptoms during major depressive episodes among patients with MDDS. The ICBT program had good acceptability and satisfaction among participants in different countries.

Despite the significant findings from this systematic review, certain limitations should be acknowledged. First, it is important to note that all the studies included in this review were exclusively conducted in the English language, potentially limiting the generalizability of the findings to non-English speaking populations. Second, the number of research studies incorporated in this systematic review was relatively limited, which may have resulted in a narrower scope of analysis. Finally, a few studies within the selected research had small sample sizes, which could potentially impact the precision and reliability of the overall conclusions drawn from this review. The authors recommend that nurses working in psychiatric units should use CBT interventions with patients with MDD.

This paper, a review of the literature gives an overview of CBT and ICBT interventions to reduce the severity of depressive symptoms and prevent patients’ relapse and rehospitalization and shows that CBT interventions are effective on relapse prevention among patients with MDD. In addition, there is still no standardized protocol to apply the CBT intervention in the scope of reducing the severity of depressive symptoms and preventing depression relapse among patients with major depressive disorder. Further research is needed to confirm the findings of this review. Future research is also needed to find out the most effective form and contents of CBT and ICBT interventions for MDD.

CBT is a psychological intervention that has been recommended by the literature for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD). It is a widely recognized and accepted approach that combines cognitive and behavioral techniques to assist individuals overcome their depressive symptoms and improve their overall mental well-being. This would speculate that effectiveness associated with several aspects and combinations of different approaches in CBT interventions and the impact of different delivery models are essential for clinical practice and appropriate selection of the interventional combinations.

This systematic review focuses on the various studies that explore the effectiveness of face-to-face CBT and ICBT in reducing depressive symptoms among patients with major depressive disorder. These studies were conducted in different countries such as Iran, Australia, Pennsylvania and the USA.