These resources provide guidance for authors of Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) reviews. They have been developed by the EPOC editorial team. They are intended as a supplement to the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, and are updated as needed.
The EPOC resources below are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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- The EPOC taxonomy and guidance for using it
- What study designs can be considered for inclusion in an EPOC review and what should they be called?
- What outcomes should be reported in EPOC reviews?
- Identifying reviews relevant to your proposed review topic
- How narrow or broad should EPOC reviews be?
- When should EPOC reviews only include studies from low- and middle-income countries?
- Review proposal form
CRITERIA FOR REGISTERING A REVIEW
- Minimum requirements for registration of a review
- Criteria for registering a qualitative evidence synthesis with EPOC
Methods
- EPOC protocol template for intervention reviews
- EPOC protocol and review template for qualitative evidence syntheses
- Describing interventions in EPOC reviews
- Version 6 of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions includes a new chapter on Intervention Complexity
Search strategies
- How to develop a search strategy
- Information specialist support to EPOC LMIC authors
- How to report the search process in EPOC protocols, reviews and updates
- Search audit template [Excel spreadsheet]
- Database syntax guide
Other considerations
- What are explanatory factors and why should they be included in protocols?
- Equity considerations in EPOC reviews
- Taking account of adverse effects in EPOC reviews
- Incorporating economic evidence in EPOC reviews
- How to describe the intervention in terms of its complexity (iCAT_SR)
Data extraction
Risk of bias
- Suggested risk of bias criteria for EPOC reviews
- How to prepare a risk of bias table for reviews that include more than one study design
- Summary assessments of the risk of bias
- WEIRD tool to assess the limitations of ‘non-conventional’ evidence sources
Data analysis
Summary of findings
Other considerations
- Taking account of adverse effects in EPOC reviews
- Equity considerations in EPOC reviews
- Incorporating economic evidence in EPOC reviews
- Qualitative Evidence Syntheses guidance on when to sample and how to develop a purposive sampling frame
- How to report the effects of an intervention
- Describing interventions in EPOC reviews
- Synthesizing results when it does not make sense to do a meta-analysis
- Results should not be reported as statistically significant or statistically non-significant
- Reporting empty reviews and results from excluded studies
- Which studies should be included in the "Characteristics of excluded studies" table?
- Implications for practice
- Implications for research
- How to report the search process in EPOC protocols, reviews and updates
SUBMITTING FOR EDITORIAL CONSIDERATION
- Author pre-submission checklist for protocols
- Author pre-submission checklist for reviews and updates
- Criteria for rejecting an EPOC protocol
- Criteria for rejecting a review/update submitted to EPOC
The EPOC resources have been prepared by the editorial team of Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC), a review group of Cochrane. The EPOC resources are all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The suggested citation for this page is "Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC). EPOC Resources for review authors, 2017. Available at: epoc.cochrane.org/epoc-resources-review-authors"
To add references to these resources in Review Manager, please use the following format:
| Reference type: | Other |
| Authors: | Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) |
| English title: | e.g. What study designs can be considered for inclusion in an EPOC review and what should they be called? EPOC resources for review authors, YYYY* |
| Journal/Book/Source: | epoc.cochrane.org/epoc-resources-review-authors (accessed DD Month YYYY) |
*Year of publication is the year from the cited resource
Preparation of these resources was supported by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. Norad did not have a role in drafting, revising or approving the content.
Feedback about how to improve these resources is welcome and should be sent to: Elizabeth Paulsen.