“SYSTEMATIC REVIEW”: IS IT DIFFERENT FROM THE “TRADITIONAL REVIEW"?

Over the past half century we have witnessed exponential growth of scientific research and its application in industry as well as daily life. Medicine is not an exception. The medical literature has grown dramatically with over 2 million articles published yearly in more than 20,000 journals.1 Keeping up with this is impossible for medical professionals, namely physicians. In addition to being unable to access all the relevant original articles published on a single topic, it has been shown that the main body of practicing and even academic and executive physicians, lack adequate methodological knowledge and expertise to take care of the published research works, even if they have adequate access.2 Therefore, “review articles” have gained wide popularity among doctors.