'The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners'
Abstract
Copyright to Australian Family Physician. Reproduced with permission. Permission to reproduce must be sought from the publisher, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.Ideally, clinical decision making ought to be based on the latest evidence available. However, to keep abreast with the continuously increasing number of publications in health research, a primary health care professional would need to read an unsurmountable number of articles every day covered in more than 13 million references and over 4800 biomedical and health journals in Medline alone.1 With the view to address this challenge, the systematic review method was developed.2 This article provides a practical guide for appraising systematic reviews for relevance to clinical practice and interpreting meta-analysis graphs as part of quantitative systematic reviews.Karin Rie
