Section 13 Interpretation & Publication

Once you have conducted your systematic review, and potentially also conducted a meta-analysis, it is time to tell the community what you found and ensure the findings from your review reach your audience.

13.1 GRADE Approach

Be careful when interpreting the results; acknowledge sources of bias; consider heterogeneity, generalisability, and relevance.

It may help to use the Preclinical Grade approach Hooijmans et al., 2018 to rate the certainty of the evidence of preclinical animal studies, in the context of therapeutic interventions.

13.2 Good reporting

Report your systematic review in a way that allows reproducibility of the results and future updating.

We recommend following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA-2020) Guidelines. The checklist can be found here. In addition, we recommend using the PRISMA Flowchart to visualise the studies in your systematic review process. The PRISMA Flowchart template can be found here.