
It should be noted that some reviews do legitimately restrict eligibility to specific outcomes. Outcomes usually are not part of the criteria for including studies, and a Cochrane Review would typically seek all sufficiently rigorous studies (most commonly randomized trials) of a particular comparison of interventions in a particular population of participants, irrespective of the outcomes measured or reported. The population, interventions and comparators in the review question usually translate directly into eligibility criteria for the review, though this is not always a straightforward process and requires a thoughtful approach, as this chapter shows.
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Eligibility criteria are based on the PICO elements of the review question plus a specification of the types of studies that have addressed these questions. When developing the protocol, one of the first steps is to determine the elements of the review question (including the population, intervention(s), comparator(s) and outcomes, or PICO elements) and how the intervention, in the specified population, produces the expected outcomes (see Chapter 2, Section 2.5.1 and Chapter 17, Section 17.2.1). One of the features that distinguishes a systematic review from a narrative review is that systematic review authors should pre-specify criteria for including and excluding studies in the review (eligibility criteria, see MECIR Box 3.2.a). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.3 (updated February 2022). In: Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors). Chapter 3: Defining the criteria for including studies and how they will be grouped for the synthesis. Review authors should plan at the protocol stage how the different populations, interventions, outcomes and study designs within the scope of the review will be grouped for analysis.Ĭite this chapter as: McKenzie JE, Brennan SE, Ryan RE, Thomson HJ, Johnston RV, Thomas J. Critical and important outcomes should be limited in number and include adverse as well as beneficial outcomes.


It is rare to use outcomes as eligibility criteria: studies should be included irrespective of whether they report outcome data, but may legitimately be excluded if they do not measure outcomes of interest, or if they explicitly aim to prevent a particular outcome.Ĭochrane Reviews should include all outcomes that are likely to be meaningful and not include trivial outcomes. The population, intervention and comparison components of the question, with the additional specification of types of study that will be included, form the basis of the pre-specified eligibility criteria for the review. The acronym PICO (population, interventions, comparators and outcomes) helps to serve as a reminder of these. The scope of a review is defined by the types of population (participants), types of interventions (and comparisons), and the types of outcomes that are of interest.
