Course: Systematic, Scoping, Rapid, Overview, and Living Reviews - What they are, and When and How to use them

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While a systematic literature review is the “gold standard” in healthcare evidence reviewing (and a requirement of many health technology assessments (HTA)), other types of review also play an important role throughout a product’s life cycle. This introductory course is aimed at commissioners of reviews. The course includes top level understanding of the main alternative types of reviews: scoping, rapid, overview and living reviews.

Scoping reviews map the evidence and identify key characteristics or factors related to a concept.

Rapid reviews (also referred to as targeted pragmatic reviews) are forms of accelerated evidence synthesis in which aspects of the typical systematic review processes are streamlined or omitted, providing additional flexibility.

Overviews of reviews can describe the current body of systematic review evidence on a topic of interest, or address a new review question that wasn’t a direct focus in existing systematic reviews.

Living reviews are systematic reviews which are continually updated, incorporating relevant new evidence as it becomes available.

Participants will leave with an ability to recognise the main features of these review types, to describe challenges and opportunities in producing them, and an understanding of when to select each type of review.

At the completion of this online learning module, you will be able to:
*Recognize the main features of different review types.
*Describe challenges and opportunities in producing different types of reviews.
*Decide which type of review is appropriate for a given research question.