Systematic review and meta-analysis are often confused and used interchangeably albeit having distinct differences between them. Both are reviews of high quality evidence that form a part of literature review.
What is a Systematic review?
A systemic review seeks to find answer to a defined question by collecting and synthesizing high quality evidence from different studies. It is an exhaustive summary of all scientific evidence substantiated to a particular question. Systematic reviews came to be as a way to improve the quality of literature review. Systematic review applies to all types of research, both qualitative and quantitative.
Systematic review evolved in the health care industry and clinical trials, but has since found its application in variety of fields like social sciences, astronomy, etc.
What is a Meta-analysis?
Meta-analysis integrates statistically similar studies using statistical principles to achieve an estimate of common point of truth between the studies. Since it is an application of statistics to integrate studies, meta-analysis involves only quantitative studies. Meta-analysis is often a subset of systematic review that identifies, selects, and combines the results of studies and applies statistical principles to achieve a pooled estimated with a higher power of statistical certainty. The principle behind meta-analysis is that all conceptually similar studies have certain core truth behind them which can be estimated to a close degree of accuracy by a weighted integration of studies.
Meta-analysis services helps to identify if a study shows more variation than what is expected. Thus, the quality of the methodology of studies can be assessed.
Meta-analysis is applied in fields such as medicine, education, psychology, criminal justice, sociology, social psychology, finance and economics, political science, etc. Pharmaceutical companies use meta-analysis to know their model’s generalizability, developing and validating different prediction models.
Drug approvals processes are required to undergo meta-analysis by regulatory bodies.
Difference between Systematic review and Meta-analysis:
If systematic review is a specialized case of literature review that distills evidence to improve quality, meta-analysis is even more precise in narrowing the result as close to the common truth as possible among conceptually similar studies.
Both systematic review and meta-analysis abridges the body of evidence for a question by the researcher.
Meta-analysis can be applied only to quantitative studies while systematic reviews include both qualitative and quantitative studies. Meta-analysis is not always conducted in the framework of systematic review, but it most often is used in systematic reviews that involve combining studies with numerical results . For systematic reviews involving qualitative studies, meta-analysis can’t be performed.
When conducting a meta-analysis for a systematic review, certain considerations are made: The identification of the relevance of studies to the question and the compatibility to perform a meta-analysis. Studies that are different can’t be combined for meta-analysis.
Both systematic reviews and Meta-analysis Research reduce bias in studies and provide comprehensive evidence to a question or a truth (statistical estimate). Systematic reviews, when dealing with conceptually similar quantitative studies apply meta-analysis to integrate results for a more accurate pool estimate. But it is not always required, and sometimes meta-analysis is conducted without the context of systematic analysis, as in the case of clinical trials. Hence, to conclude, systematic review involves meta-analysis as a subset and meta-analysis forms the pinnacle of evidence based reviews.
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