Systematic Reviews: Analysing and synthesising

  Now you have chosen the articles you want to include in your review, you will need to analyse and synthesise them.

Your librarian can not help with this part but here are some things to consider:

Analysis - also known as critical appraisal, or critiquing. You should analyse the quality of the papers carefully. See the 'critical appraisal tools' box for tools that will help you do this.

Synthesis - you will need to bring together the information from your chosen papers to find an answer to your research question. It is possible to synthesise using quantitative and qualitative methods depending on your topic. However, synthesising is most commonly done using a quantitative method called meta-analysis (see the 'meta-analysis' box). Please speak to your supervisor if you are unsure about which method to use.