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.
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 — which model to use, how to handle heterogeneity, what to do with studies that report incompatible outcome measures. We provide statistical consulting specifically for meta-analysis: choosing between fixed-effect and random-effects models, running and interpreting heterogeneity statistics like I² and tau², building forest plots and funnel plots, and helping you write up the statistical methods section in language a methods reviewer will accept.
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.