Hi,
Currently I am screening articles for my systematic review. Most of the articles are human retrospective cohorts studies and couple of articles have animal (mice) studies. If mice experimental studies meets our interventional criteria, can we include those studies in systematic review?
Your comments will help me a lot.
Thanks.
Hello Nirmal! In a systematic review it is important to have a specific population of interest when you formulate your research question and inclusion criteria. So if your population of interest is humans with a certain condition, your systematic review shouldn't include studies with mice, and vice versa. However, it is possible to include both animal and human studies in your systematic review if both animals and humans are in your population of interest like what was done here: Article Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of human and animal evi...
Agreed with Farah. Your research question will answer that question. In any research, the question you want to address is used to be central. That's why it is well known fact that the research question should be well thought of.
If you decide to include both types of studies because they address your research question (as mentioned previously), it may be a good idea to stratify the results by study type. How you will judge the quality of research and interpret effect sizes etc is likely to vary between animal and human studies.
Dear Nirmal Prasad Bhatt
Before your systematic review you should define your population of interest very explicitly. You can opt to include both human and animal populations, or exclude either of them, depending on your research question. However the decision on which population to include needs to be made at the time of preparing the protocol for the review.
Thanks Farah Nabil Abdelnaim Mohamed
I am working on project which includes both human and animal. Therefore, I want to include both.
Thank you again for your suggestions.