Carrasco, C, Vanegas, J, Rivas, K. Literature review for the development of protocols in the diagnosis, surveillance and forensic assessment of work-related musculoskeletal injuries. Medwave. 2014;14(Suppl 1):e5776.
This article is excluded from the Epistemonikos database for the following reason:
Does not fulfill criteria for systematic review
We select articles in three main categories plus one secondary category:
We group in this category different types of articles aiming to make a synthesis of systematic reviews and, sometimes, primary studies.
We consider a broad synthesis for inclusion if,
We consider a systematic review for inclusion if it fulfills the following criteria:
We also include synthesis of primary studies that do not fulfill the above definition but are judged to add valuable information. Some examples are individual patient meta-analysis or meta-analysis of unpublished data.
Primary study is an umbrella term that includes any study design, qualitative or quantitative, where data is collected from individuals or groups of people.
We read the full text of the articles in the above categories to extract the list of included studies that the authors reported, and we incorporate them to the database. We do not add any additional criteria to those imposed by the researchers conducting the systematic reviews.
Apart from the 3 main categories we also include a secondary category of structured summaries. Structured summaries are summaries of an article developed for non-research audiences which follow a pre-established format which include at least a critical appraisal of the article.
We exclude articles from any of the above categories if they: