Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: A realist review (RR) provides managers and policy makers with a rich and detailed understanding of a particular issue. The approach helps determine whether findings might work, in what settings, when, how and why. But the epidemic characteristics of realist reviews have not been evaluated.
Objectives: To identify RR and survey of their epidemic characteristics.
Methods: An electronic literature search of all RRs from inception to February 2012 was conducted using PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and EMBASE. using the following search terms ‘realist review’ or ‘realistic review’ in the title and keywords. Two reviewers independently determined study eligibility and extracted details on published year and country, synthesis methods, convergence, and search detail etal.
Results: Twenty-one studies were included, Table 1 showed that the frequency of RRs were found to increase during 2005–2012; the authors of 81.0% RRs were Canada and UK; 3 RRs focused on methods of RRs, other RRs focused on social sciences (9.5%), policy (19.0%), practice (9.5%), processes (19.0%), interventions (28.6%); MEDLINE/PubMed (72.2%), EMBASE (38.9%), and Web of Science (33.3%) were used to search relative studies in 18 RRs; 27.8% RRs searched less than 3 database, which may be miss some studies; 83.3% RRs searched the reference lists of included trials and published reviews for potentially relevant studies; 55.6% RRs synthesized studies by critical interpretive synthesis. As well as, we found that RR methodology still being refined.
Conclusions: RR is a relatively new strategy for synthesizing research which has some problems on methods, for example, which database and synthesis methods should be used to prepare RR. Therefore, we suggest that future research should focus on methodological questions.
Objectives: To identify RR and survey of their epidemic characteristics.
Methods: An electronic literature search of all RRs from inception to February 2012 was conducted using PubMed, the Cochrane Library, and EMBASE. using the following search terms ‘realist review’ or ‘realistic review’ in the title and keywords. Two reviewers independently determined study eligibility and extracted details on published year and country, synthesis methods, convergence, and search detail etal.
Results: Twenty-one studies were included, Table 1 showed that the frequency of RRs were found to increase during 2005–2012; the authors of 81.0% RRs were Canada and UK; 3 RRs focused on methods of RRs, other RRs focused on social sciences (9.5%), policy (19.0%), practice (9.5%), processes (19.0%), interventions (28.6%); MEDLINE/PubMed (72.2%), EMBASE (38.9%), and Web of Science (33.3%) were used to search relative studies in 18 RRs; 27.8% RRs searched less than 3 database, which may be miss some studies; 83.3% RRs searched the reference lists of included trials and published reviews for potentially relevant studies; 55.6% RRs synthesized studies by critical interpretive synthesis. As well as, we found that RR methodology still being refined.
Conclusions: RR is a relatively new strategy for synthesizing research which has some problems on methods, for example, which database and synthesis methods should be used to prepare RR. Therefore, we suggest that future research should focus on methodological questions.
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