Background: It has been argued that systematic reviews fail to inform clinical decision-making due to their results being far too general such that the findings do not apply to individual clinical cases. Few systematic reviews investigate clinical reasons for heterogeneity and when they do often fail to use valid methods. We will provide detailed guidance on how to investigate clinical characteristics when performing systematic reviews.

Objectives: To provide a detailed overview of the methods for investigating clinical heterogeneity in systematic reviews The presentation will describe how and when to identify variables, how to examine the influence of these variables on pooled effect estimates, statistical and non-statistical methods for investigating clinical variables, how to present and interpret the findings.