Physiotherapy: Step Two: Develop your inclusion and exclusion criteria

Things to ask yourself:

1. What will be included in your study?
2. What will be excluded?
3. What date range will you include?
4. What age, gender will your subjects be?
5. Is there a particular type of study say qualitative that you will include or mixed method?
6. Will it be only New Zealand studies?
7. Will it only be a particular group of people?
8. What is the scope of your enquiry?
9. What databases will you use?
10. Will you use gray literature?
11. Will it be a narrative literature review or a meta analysis review?

Also consider:

Study characteristics such as:

• Full citation 
• Setting
• Duration
• Objectives
• Intervention
• Study Design and methodology
• Participant characteristics
• Outcome measures
• Results
• Study quality factors

The reasons to include an inclusion and exclusion criteria:

• A criteria will promote a systematic and methodical research process and reduce any risk of bias
• It will add rigor to your final result and validity to the process
• It creates good communication  with others and gives all systematic reviews a consistency
• Other health professionals will be able to see the reliability and usefulness of the review

Scribbr: Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria | Examples & Definition

Take a look at the Cochrane database to see how other researchers have arranged their reviews and the outcomes they achieved.

3.  Develop a PRISMA Statement. Use this link to get an app that creates your diagram for you. https://www.eshackathon.org/software/PRISMA2020.html

Using the PRISMA Guidelines

"The aim of the PRISMA Statement is to help authors improve the reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. We have focused on randomized trials, but PRISMA can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions. PRISMA may also be useful for the critical appraisal of published systematic reviews, although it is not a quality assessment instrument to gauge the quality of a systematic review. The PRISMA Statement consists of a 27-item checklist and a four-phase flow diagram" (PRISMA, n.d.).

"PRISMA stands for Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses" (PRISMA, n.d.).

prisma-statement.org

  Exemplar to follow