Course details
General
Faculty | Health Sciences | ||
Department | Medicine | ||
Education level | Postgraduate / Master of Science | ||
Course code | E2 | Semester | 2 |
Course title | Systematic review & meta-analysis | ||
Independent teaching activities | Hours per week | ECTS | |
Lectures | 1 | ||
Practice | 2 | ||
Total | 4 | 4 | |
Coursetype | General setting course, skills development | ||
Prerequisite courses | None | ||
Teaching and assessment language | English |
Learning outcomes
Objective
Upon completion of the course, students will know the basic principles of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and will have gained the experience of a systematic review, on an own research question. Students will discuss and work on their own question with their colleagues, will go through all stages of a systematic review, they will reflect on and understand all the decisions one needs to take one during a review.
Knowledge
Upon completion of the course, graduate students will be familiar with:
- The basic principles of systematic reviews and meta-analyses
- The stages from start through completion of a systematic review
- The process and existing repositories for publication of systematic reviews protocol
- Reporting guidelines for systematic reviews
Skills
The course participants upon completion will be able to:
- Formulate a clear research question, in a format that can be answered (PICO)
- Formulate a search strategy
- Devise a statistical analysis plan
- Facilitate a search
- Hold literature cleanup and disposal of non-eligible studies
- Perform statistical analysis
- Assess and handle heterogeneity
- Assess the risk of bias
- Integrate risk assessment bias in their results
- Assess quality of their conclusions
Course contents
During the course, students will work on their own research question, and will experience the process of review at all stages. So they will learn how to:
- Formulate a research question that can be answered
- Describe the study selection criteria
- Develop a search strategy
- Develop a data extraction form
- Develop an analysis plan
- Devise a strategy for assessing the quality of studies
- Hold a systematic review
- Hold the meta-analysis
Teaching and learning methods – evaluation
Teaching methods | Face to face Distance learning |
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Use of information and communication technologies (ICT) |
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Module structure | Work Hours per Semester | Activity |
Lectures | 30 | |
Exercises (Quiz) | 5 | |
Exercises (Wikis) | 5 | |
Exercises (Online discussion fora) | 10 | |
Exercises (Study relevant papers) | 20 | |
Essay background work | 40 | |
Essay writing | 15 | |
Overall work for the course | 125 | |
Assessment Methods |
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Recommended Bibliography
- Murad MH, Montori VM, Ioannidis JP, Jaeschke R, Devereaux PJ, Prasad K, Neumann I, Carrasco-Labra A, Agoritsas T, Hatala R, Meade MO, Wyer P, Cook DJ, Guyatt G. How to read a systematic review and meta-analysis and apply the results to patient care: users’ guides to the medical literature. JAMA. 2014 Jul;312(2):171-9. doi: 10.1001/jama.2014.5559. PubMed PMID: 25005654.
- Yuan Y, Hunt RH. Systematic reviews: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Am J Gastroenterol. 2009 May;104(5):1086-92. doi: 10.1038/ajg.2009.118. Review. PubMed PMID: 19417748.