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=Project page a series of tutorials on how to conduct systematic review=

Summary
This document provides a brief documentation and lists topics for an email based course on conducting systematic reviews and meta analysis. The course is aimed at clinicians, and advanced post graduate students to conduct systematic review.

The course will span about 12 topics (indicated below) and take about 12 weeks to complete. Each week, one or two instructors will spend four days a week (Monday through Thursday) to discuss one of the following 12 topics and students who will be enrolled in this course will be responsible to reply or conduct their own learning. Although there is no formal certificate or any other evaluation for this course, nor is this course required for any degree or diploma or certification of any kind, it is anticipated that students will participate in this course and contribute to it on their own accord for their personal learning and growth. This course may be useful for a wide range of professionals.In order to join the course, visit the following website and follow instructions to join the yahoo! group for further instructions.

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Each module covered (as indicated below) will consist of one or more cases, followed a brief discussion of core principles, some short provocative questions and answers, and finally on the fourth day of the module, a summary and observations by the teacher/instructor for that module. Since the modules span a number of different topics, it is anticipated that a number of instructors from different disciplines will take part in teaching the course.

The discussions posted by the students and the instructors will be archived and be made available at this wiki site for future reference. This wiki site will also contain links, references, and links to discussions and other resources as appropriate. A lofty hope might be that this site eventually becomes a living textbook for this course regularly updated by the course instructors and students.

Topics covered in this course with brief description
__**The first week**__ of the course will begin with each teacher introducing himself or herself, and the students will also introduce themselves. This week will consist of a self-adminstered mutliple choice test on the core concepts of systematic review/meta analysis (this test is not mandatory, students are supposed to take them voluntarily)

__**Week 1/Topic 1. How to frame an answerable research question in healthcare**__

(Teacher:  )

Each systematic review begins with a focused structured clinical or otherwise question. The purpose of this module will be to teach students of this course ("students") how to frame such questions in terms of the population to be covered, the intervention to be studied, the health outcomes to be studied and the comparison groups.

__**Week 2/Topic 2. How to frame search questions and search literature databases and manage citation managers for your study?**__

(Teacher:  )

In this module the above questions will be expanded to suit how search queries are framed based on structured questions. In this module a number of search engines will be described along with how to structure queries to mine the literature and other databases to search. This is important because search is an important part of conducting a systematic review

__**Week 3/Topic 3. How to write the study protocol for a systematic review**__

(Teacher:  )

In any systematic review, writing a scoping protocol is the most important starting point. The scoping protocol includes summary of the research question, the search terms to be used for searching the literature databases and overall plan of approaching the review. It is expected that at the end of this module, the students can write on their own a study protocol.

__**Week 4/Topic 4. An overview of the evidence based healthcare: this is going to be an entry level fairly low level introduction to evidence hierarchy and study designs**__

(Teacher:  )

In this module the teacher introduces the different types of clinical and epidemiological study designs and how they are related to constructing the best "evidence" for finding an association between either an intervention and a health outcome. This can not only be intervention but also any other form of "exposure" for which a systematic review is being planned.

__**Week 5/Topic 5. What is meant by PICOT framework and why does one need it?**__

(Teacher:  )

The term PICOT stands for "Population-Intervention-Comparison Group - Outcomes - Time" and indicates how studies can be either searched for or analyzed using how population were selected, how intervention was designed, how comparison groups were selected and how study outcome were designed. One week is devoted to discuss these topics.

__**Week 6/Topic 6. What points should be focused in order to critically appraise randomized controlled trials and other study designs ?**__

(Teacher:  )

Critical appraisal of clinical studies, randomized controlled trials and other epidemiological study designs is the first analytical step for conducting a systematic review and meta analysis. This module will enable students to learn of the tools and decision making points to correctly appraise intervention-based and observational study designs.

__**Week 7/Topic 7. Introduction, listing, and explanations for different quality assessment checklists for clinical trials and observational epidemiological study designs**__

(Teacher:  )

Assessment of quality of studies is a very important component of conducting systematic review, including self checking as to how the systematic review itself is being conducted. In this module, this component will be taught to the students.

__**Week 8/Topic 8. How to set up data extraction tables for conducting literature reviews**__

(Teacher:  )

Following identification of the studies and analysis, data extraction from individual studies is the next step. Typically, investigators frame a research question, identify the resources, determine if a resource is suitable for review based initially on the title and abstract of the study, then retrieve the full text of the study and then start the process of critical appraisal. After critical appraisal is complete, the investigator then starts working on extracting critical information for further analysis of data.

__**Week 9/Topic 9. How to test and interpret results of the tests for homogeneity of variance of different studies?**__

(Teacher:  )

The decision, whether to pool together the results of the component studies into one report or whether to further statistically pool together data from component studies is a crucial step that differentiates a systematic review from a formal meta analysis. Most commonly this is usually done using formal tests of homogeneity of variance, but there are other approaches as well. All these different approaches as well as formal testing of homogeneity of variance and how they are interpreted will be taught in this segment.

__**Week 10/Topic 10. When and how to pool the results of the studies in either a systematic review or a meta analysis?**__

(Teacher:  )

After the first part of analyzing each study and taking a decision whether to include or exclude it from the study, and then extraction of data and assessing the quality of the studies, comes the step of pooling together key information from the studies. In this segment, the students will learn how to do that for narrative descriptions, as well as for statistical pooling of the results from different studies. In addition, students will learn how to use various graphical approaches to pool together the results of studies, and examine how gray literature have been handled, using a range of plots such as l'abbe plots, forest plots, funnel plots and other graphical approaches.

__**Week 11/Topic 11. Summary session**__

(All teachers will be involved in this session to put in their summary of discussions and reflections on the course). At the end of this week, or as part of this week, a multiple choice question based test will be administered over the web to the students to test their skills and how much they learned.

Output of this project
This course is going to be delivered entirely online using emails, and at the end of this course, the teachers can aim to get published based on the results of this course and student feedbacks.