An Introduction to Systematic Reviews

To every clinical encounter, dentists bring expertise, clinical skills, and past experience. Patients bring their unique values, preferences, concerns, and expectations. Dentists hope and patients expect that the best, most up-to-date, clinically relevant knowledge, especially from patient-centered research, will be available to guide the clinical decision-making process. Unfortunately, there is an over-abundance of evidence, which is poorly organized and difficult to access in the biomedical literature, and whose quality is highly variable. Busy clinicians may have neither the time nor, in many cases, the skills to seek evidence to inform decisions. Pre-appraised evidence, found in evidence-based journals, systematic reviews, and clinical practice guidelines, has the potential to make evidence-based practice feasible for front-line dentists. Systematic reviews, with their ability to quality-filter and synthesize large amounts of evidence and provide the foundation for practice guidelines, are central to the evidence-based process.