Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis Support
Methodological consulting across every stage of your review — protocol, search strategy, screening, extraction, risk of bias, and synthesis — so your methodology holds up under peer review.
Systematic reviews are judged on their methodology before they’re judged on their conclusions. A reviewer will look for the same things regardless of your topic: a registered, PRISMA-compliant protocol; a reproducible search strategy; a transparent screening and extraction process; and a risk-of-bias assessment applied consistently across your included studies.
We provide methodological consulting across every stage of the systematic review process, for researchers running full systematic reviews, meta-analyses, scoping reviews, rapid reviews, and umbrella reviews, and for teams working within specific methodological traditions like Cochrane or JBI.
What we don’t do is conduct your review for you. Every service below is scoped to guidance, consulting, and editing on a review that you and your research team are conducting and authoring.
What you get back.
Every engagement ships with the concrete artifacts a journal reviewer or thesis committee actually asks for — not just a conversation.
PROSPERO-ready protocol
A reviewed protocol document, structured around PICO/PICOS, ready for you to file under your own PROSPERO account.
Search strategy & reproducibility pack
Database-by-database query strings, filters, and dates — documented so any reviewer can rerun your search.
PRISMA 2020 flow diagram
A reviewed flow diagram with identification, screening, eligibility, and inclusion counts that reconcile cleanly.
Risk-of-bias & GRADE tables
RoB 2 or ROBINS-I assessments matched to your study designs, plus GRADE certainty ratings by outcome.
Forest & funnel plots
Publication-ready figures with heterogeneity statistics and reproducible R or Stata code behind them.
PRISMA-checked manuscript edit
A line-by-line edit against the full 27-item checklist, formatted for your target journal or committee.
Six ways to scope the review itself
Complete Systematic Reviews
A full systematic review moves through five distinct phases - protocol registration, search strategy, screening, data extraction, and synthesis - and each phase has its own risk of introducing bias or inconsistency. We provide end-to-end methodological consulting across all five: helping you register a PROSPERO protocol, build and test your search strings across databases, set up dual-screening workflows, design extraction forms that stay consistent across reviewers, and structure your evidence synthesis and results reporting. This is the service most PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and clinical review teams start with when the review itself - not just one section of it - is the deliverable. You and your review team remain the named authors throughout; our role is to make sure the methodology holds up when a journal's methods reviewer goes looking for it.
Meta-Analysis Support
Pooling effect sizes across studies sounds straightforward until you hit the details. We provide statistical consulting across the full meta-analysis workflow: choosing the right effect size metric for your outcome (risk ratio, odds ratio, mean difference, standardized mean difference), selecting between fixed-effect and random-effects models based on your actual heterogeneity, and running I² and tau² statistics to quantify how much studies genuinely disagree. We help build forest plots that communicate the pooled estimate clearly, and funnel plots — with Egger's test or trim-and-fill where appropriate — to check for publication bias before a reviewer asks about it. Where your data supports it, we consult on subgroup analysis, meta-regression, and sensitivity analysis to test how robust your pooled estimate really is. We also help structure a GRADE Summary of Findings table so certainty of evidence is rated transparently by outcome, and provide annotated R or Stata code so your analysis is fully reproducible — by you, your committee, or a journal's statistical reviewer.
Scoping Reviews
A scoping review answers a different question than a systematic review - not “what does the evidence say” but “how much evidence exists, and what does it look like.” We help you apply the JBI or Arksey & O'Malley scoping review framework correctly, which matters because scoping reviews are frequently misclassified and get pushed back by reviewers on methodology grounds alone.
Narrative Reviews
Not every research question needs - or can support - a systematic methodology. When the literature is too heterogeneous to synthesize quantitatively, a narrative review is the more honest and defensible choice. We help you structure a narrative review so it still reads as rigorous and intentional: a clear organizing framework, transparent search documentation, and a synthesis explicitly framed as thematic rather than quantitative.
Rapid Reviews
When a decision-maker needs an evidence summary in weeks rather than the 12–18 months a full systematic review takes, a rapid review is the standard tool. We help you adapt standard systematic review methodology to a compressed timeline in ways that are still defensible, being explicit in your methods section about which steps were streamlined and why.
Umbrella Reviews
An umbrella review synthesizes findings across multiple existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses on a related topic, rather than going back to primary studies. We help you select and appraise the systematic reviews you're including, resolve conflicting conclusions across them, and structure a synthesis that adds real value on top of the reviews you're drawing from.
Getting the standard right, early
PRISMA Guidance
PRISMA 2020 isn't just a checklist you fill in at the end - it's a reporting standard that shapes how your review should be structured from the first draft of your protocol. We walk through the PRISMA checklist and flow diagram with you at each stage of your review, not just before submission.
PICO / PICOS Framework
Every well-formed review question breaks down into Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome - and, for some review types, Study design (PICOS). We help you build out a framework specific enough to guide a real search strategy, not just a restatement of your general research interest.
PROSPERO Registration
Registering your protocol on PROSPERO before you begin screening is expected for most systematic reviews. We help you prepare a submission that matches what you'll actually do, and guide you through the registration process itself.
Cochrane Reviews
Cochrane reviews follow one of the most rigorous methodological standards in evidence synthesis. We support authors working within Cochrane review groups on protocol development, RoB 2 risk-of-bias assessment, and GRADE certainty-of-evidence ratings.
JBI Reviews
The Joanna Briggs Institute methodology is widely used for reviews in nursing, allied health, and evidence-based healthcare. We help you apply JBI methodology correctly for the review type you're running, including JBI-specific critical appraisal checklists.
The mechanics that hold a review together
Literature Search Strategy
A search strategy that misses key studies undermines everything built on top of it. We help you select the right databases, build and iteratively test Boolean search strings, and document your search in a way that's fully reproducible.
Data Extraction Support
Consistent data extraction across multiple reviewers and dozens of studies is harder than it sounds. We help you design extraction forms that reduce ambiguity, pilot them before full rollout, and set up inter-rater consistency checks.
Quality Appraisal
Not all included studies carry equal weight. We help you select the right appraisal tool - AMSTAR-2, CASP, Newcastle-Ottawa, or others - and apply it consistently across your included studies.
Risk of Bias Assessment
We help you apply the right risk-of-bias framework - Cochrane RoB 2 for randomized trials, ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies - and reconcile disagreements between reviewers using a documented, defensible process.
Review Editing
Once your review is written, it still needs line-level editing and a PRISMA-compliance check, plus a structural read for whether the synthesis actually follows from the evidence. We provide a dedicated editing pass for completed reviews and meta-analyses.