Systematic Reviews

Professor: Hempel
Units: 0.5
Elective Course (Research Analysis and Design: Empirical Analysis)

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This course will introduce students to literature overviews ranging from finding key articles for a background section to comprehensive systematic reviews. We will focus on the research methodology applied to literature overviews that aim to enable a reproducible and unbiased summary of the existing research.

Systematic reviews synthesize the available evidence to answer a research or policy question. Meta-analysis is a statistical technique to pool data across primary studies. There will be special emphasis on evidence-based medicine as systematic reviews are a common research tool in this field, and new research is guided by identified gaps in the existing evidence base. However, the methodology is equally applicable to any subject area where there is a body of evidence to be summarized, and standards for literature overviews and meta-analyses are rising in all research areas.