write-a-systematic-review-protocol

name	write-a-systematic-review-protocol
category	school
description	Write a systematic review protocol with preregistered questions, eligibility, searches, screening, extraction, bias assessment, synthesis, and amendment control. Use when a review must minimize selection and analysis discretion.

write-a-systematic-review-protocol

Make consequential choices before results can influence them.

When to use

• Use for systematic, scoping, evidence, or rapid reviews with explicit method.
• Do not call a convenience literature search systematic.

Preconditions

• Establish review expertise, librarian support, question framework, stakeholders, timetable, databases, and registration route.

Procedure

1. Define questions, populations, interventions or exposures, comparators, outcomes, contexts, and study designs.
2. Specify inclusion, exclusion, language, date, publication-status, duplicate-report, and retraction rules.
3. Draft reproducible database and grey-literature searches with a qualified reviewer.
4. Define deduplication, two-person screening, disagreement, reasons for exclusion, and flow reporting.
5. Define extraction fields, calibration, multiple-report linkage, missing information, and author contact.
6. Select risk-of-bias tools by design and separate study quality from result direction.
7. Predefine narrative, quantitative, subgroup, sensitivity, heterogeneity, and certainty methods.
8. Register the protocol and version amendments with date, rationale, and impact.

Failure plan

• If resources force a rapid method, label and justify each restriction.
• If the question changes after search, preserve the original and register the amendment.

Worked example

A review of tutoring programs preregisters school populations, outcomes, databases, duplicate screening, cluster-design handling, and a no-pooling rule for incompatible measures.

Done

• A systematic-review protocol document records question, eligibility, search, screening, extraction, bias, synthesis, certainty, and amendments
• Peer-search, pilot-screening, extraction-calibration, registration, duplicate-report, and retraction checks verify readiness