Conducting systematic reviews of intervention questions II: Relevance screening, data extraction, assessing risk of bias, presenting the results and interpreting the findings.

Abstract

This is the fifth in a series of six articles describing systematic reviews in animal agriculture and veterinary medicine. The previous articles in this series overviewed the development of a review protocol and the initial steps in conducting a systematic review: identification of a structured question to be answered and conducting a comprehensive literature search to find potentially relevant original research to address the review question. This article describes relevance screening of literature identified in the search to determine which of the original research articles are relevant to the review question, data extraction from primary research studies, the use of standardized procedures to assess the risk of bias in the relevant research studies, presenting the results of the body of research identified and interpreting these results.