My supervisor & the Systematic Review

I have met my supervisor several times, Alhamdulillah I think my prayer was answered by Allah SWT. Alhamdulillah 33x. I found that she is a very kind lady, soft spoken and highly concern about her students. I should grab this opportunity to prove that I can be a good student and able to progress positively towards the PhD. Ameen.

During the second meeting with my supervisor, we discuss a lot about conducting systematic review (SR). She had written several papers together with Barbara Kitchenhem (from Keele University) especially on applying the SR technique in Software Engineering (SE). She also gave me a book title “Systematic Review to support evidence-based medicine” so that I can refer to how was the SR being used in medicine.

SR is new to me. I have neither heard about it nor even apply it before, so now it is my job to dig in depth about how it can be used to assist me in conducting my literature review systematically. If anybody knows about it, please advice me accordingly. Tq! What I understand from my reading was that SR is conducted as an alternative to the traditional review. We are living in the information society and certainly in our life, there are times where we had to make important decision. As decision maker, definitely you will never have the time to read all those thousands or perhaps millions of article just to understand or grab a little piece of knowledge about something in order to make that correct decision. SR will help you with that. It provides means or mechanism to extract, appraise critically on those related evidence without bias. That’s the key point – No biasness. In regard to the traditional review (this is what we do all the while), authors (including me) tend to write something more or less related to our personal interest. If we tend to agree on something though the fact is it was not that true, then we are giving false information to those who read our paper. Obviously that should not be happened!

SR, on the other hand helps us in deciding and appraising those primary studies as well as reproducing the result. Now, the morale of the story is, “if you want to do something, some where, do it systematically..” Hehe.. J)

Sounds like I got the tune of it hehe J

That’s only very little that I know…help me please………….!! I am now trying hard to write up the protocol for the SR. I still don’t know how to go about it.. O Allah please give me the guidance. Ameen..

“O Allah, there is no ease except in that which You have made easy, and You make the difficulty, if You wish, easy.”