Healthcare decision makers—including clinicians and other healthcare providers—increasingly turn to systematic reviews for reliable, evidence-based comparisons of health interventions. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies. They can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. But the quality of systematic reviews varies; often the scientific rigor of the collected literature is not scrutinized or there are errors in data extraction and meta-analysis.
