A step-by-step guide for conducting an umbrella review

Abstract

Background: The rapid increase in published research poses challenges for healthcare professionals aiming to stay updated. While systematic reviews help synthesize findings, their abundance can overwhelm readers. Umbrella reviews address this by summarizing multiple systematic reviews, offering a comprehensive perspective on specific topics.

Methods: This article offers a practical, step-by-step guide for conducting an umbrella review, aimed at researchers and clinicians alike.

Results: Umbrella reviews effectively integrate data from systematic reviews, ensuring clearer evidence synthesis. Tools like Rayyan and Covidence streamline processes such as screening and data extraction. Strategies for managing overlapping studies and assessing methodological quality enhance the validity of findings.

Conclusion: Umbrella reviews are invaluable for evidence-based decision-making, especially in healthcare. This guide equips researchers and clinicians with a structured approach to navigate and synthesize the growing body of systematic reviews, fostering reliable and actionable insights.

Introduction

In modern medicine, evidence-based decision-making is crucial [1], driving the need for reliable information amid an exponential growth of research articles [2], which makes it difficult for practitioners and researchers to stay up-to-date [1]. In response to this challenge, systematic reviews emerged to consolidate vast scientific literature into concise summaries [2]. However, the rapid increment of systematic reviews itself posed a fresh set of challenges for readers [3], which underscores the need for a more comprehensive approach: the umbrella review.

In one sentence, an umbrella review can be seen as a review of systematic reviews. They may also be referred to as “overview of systematic reviews,” “meta-reviews,” or “review of reviews.” By collating and interpreting data addressing a few predefined questions, umbrella reviews prevent researchers from being overwhelmed with large volumes of contradictory individual evidence [4,5,6]. These reviews also assess the quality of evidence and potential publication bias in the included reviews, fostering evidence-based decision-making in clinical practice [7].

Current standard recommends following the Preferred Reporting Items for Overviews of Reviews (PRIOR) checklist, to ensure that the review process is rigorous, transparent, and reproducible. The PRIOR checklist covers all essential steps from the rationale to data synthesis (Supplementary Table 1) [8]. However, the PRIOR checklist does not explicitly present a step-by-step approach to conduct an umbrella review, which is a challenge to those who has no experience in conducting such reviews. This article provides a step-by-step process of conducting an umbrella review, highlighting its advantages and potential as a reliable source of evidence for healthcare decision-making, following the PRIOR guidelines. To further illustrate the steps of conducting an umbrella review, we used an article entitled: “Dietary Sugar Consumption and Health: Umbrella Review”[9].