A brief overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses

Systematic reviews (SRs) are performed to acquire all evidence to address a specific clinical question and involve a reproducible and thorough search of the literature and critical appraisal of eligible studies. When combined with a meta-analysis (quantitatively pooling of results of individual studies), a rigorously conducted SR provides the best available evidence for informing clinical practice. In this article, we provide a brief overview of SRs and meta-analyses for anaesthesiologists.