Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Systematic review (SR) is of the art of synthesis of evidence from primary studies and has been systematically conducted to provide up-to-date evidence for health care decisions by addressing a single specific research question. Meta-analysis (MA) is a systematic review aiming to produce a single quantitative estimate by combining the findings from individual primary studies using appropriate statistical methods that reduce biases and random errors. SR and MA are powerful tools to precisely estimate health service coverage, diseases burden, for identification of relevant associated factors, and to recommend effective and efficient interventions for use in daily health care practice. Thus, they are indispensable for the practice of evidence-based medicine and medical decision-making. It has often been claimed that the number of SRs and MA being published has been increased steadily over recent years at the national, regional, and global levels. In PubMed, the search of the term ‘systematic review’ in the title provided us 167,029 records in 2021 (search date December 24, 2021), whereas searching the term ‘meta-analysis’ in the title provides us 137,830 records. This shows there is a clear trend of increased publication SRs and MA over time. For example, 28,959 articles were tagged as SRs in MEDLINE in 2014 and 22,774 SRs or meta-analyses were indexed in 2017. In Ethiopia, currently, it is believed more than 450 SRs and MA were published in preclinical, clinical, and public health fields, which is four times the publication rate in 2018. However, there is lack of robust study that systematically characterized and evaluate these SRs and MA. The objective of this project is to conduct an overview of preclinical, clinical and public health systematic reviews and meta-analyses in Ethiopia, synthesize evidence and build database. The the results from the project will have immense relevance to improve the quality of SRs and MA, and broad the discovery of science in the Ethiopian context.