The Surgeon’s Guide to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses summarize findings from multiple primary studies to answer focused research questions. This chapter seeks to familiarize surgeons with the basic techniques for critically appraising systematic reviews and meta-analyses as presented in the surgical literature. The critical appraisal of systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be broken down into three main questions: (1) Are the results valid? (2) What are the results? (3) Can I apply the results to patient care? The chapter will demonstrate how to answer the above questions using an example scenario and a critical appraisal of an article from the literature.