Investigating Systematic Reviews Outside Health Sciences

Abstract

Originally developed for medicine and related fields in support of evidence-based practice, systematic reviews (SRs) are now published in other fields. We investigated non-health sciences disciplines that are publishing systematic reviews. We searched the Scopus database for articles with “systematic review*” in the title or abstract. Results were limited to review articles. Articles were examined by reviewers to determine if they a) were classified as SRs by the authors, b) written in English and c) addressed a non-health sciences topic. We reconciled differences for articles on which there was not initial consensus, and grouped remaining articles according to Scopus subject areas. Our filtered result set included 952 self-described systematic reviews outside the health science disciplines. We then examined a random sample of 90 articles and compared each article's methodology to health sciences systematic review criteria. Our results show that the non-health science disciplines with the highest number of self described systematic reviews appear to be the social sciences, environmental science, business, computer science and engineering. Details about inclusion/exclusion criteria and the databases used were often included. A majority of our sample did not clearly describe the search strategy or use published SR protocols as a basis for methodology. Librarians were consulted in only 3 of 90 articles we examined.