Academic types?

Is it for a journal review?

TBH if I don't want to include papers, I don't bother? I give a token explaination such as "data available from reports by XYZ or whatever will not be considered due to reason ABC/is already comprehensively covered in review DEF. Instead, this review will focus on data collected <within the past Xyears>etc

Yes, that's the good thing about systematic reviews - you can to a certain extent 'select' the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Just be wary that it doesn't make your sample size too small or you will have trouble getting it past reviewers. If you can give a good reason for why studies were excluded (no control, small sample size, data reused from preexisting study, > 10 yr (or whatever age appropriate to the topic)) then you are fully justified in doing so.For my last SR (I'm a med writer doing mainly SR btw), the topic was full of poor quality, uncontrolled, ancient studies and it was crying out for someone to say 'ignore this, this and this and let's look at the good ones who did the study properly'.

Is there no advice on the Cochrane Collaboration website - I know they do a lot of reviews / meta-analysis.

Hurrah, knowledgeable types! ?

May as well run this one past you also.

It's a review of the effects of parental bereavement in childhood...

I'm excluding those that provide no comparison group. I've also specified that I'm only answering the question 'what are the effects of' and not answering a potential 2nd question that is 'what factors contribute to'. This means papers I have found that only use a group of bereaved children with no comparison and merely look at within-group differences aren't included.

However, I'm not sure whether I should be only including studies that compare the children to 'non-bereaved children' as I have one paper comparing cancer v suicide death that obviously adds to the picture but is more answering the 2nd potential question. and there is no control group of non-bereaved...

Another paper compares parentally bereaved children to parentally bereaved adults. Again, tells us something additional but no comparison to a control.

I just want to make sure i'm not cutting out potentially interesting papers for the sake of it and be sure i can justify my criteria.

Any ideas? ?

?

Can't believe hadn't looked there, had been looking at the York site. I will look. I'm currently surrounded by about 30 articles, have 6 documents open and numerous websites, so easy to forget the obvious sometimes! ?

Is there any scope for bringing these papers up in the Discussion section? Something like 'Study X which was excluded from the present review due to lack of control population shows... It is often a way to include data that the reader might like or expect to see but without you having to completely redo your analysis to include.

Thanks. I'm not going for publication as I'm due a baby in under 4 weeks so I just want to pass the assignment!

Someone in the year above had included a table in her appendices detailing the last 20 or so excluded studies from the process so I could do that.

I just need to make sure I justify why I've excluded ones that could add to the picture but I'm thinking it should be fairly acceptable to say MUST have comparison group of non-bereaved children and so I can therefore exclude these. Hmm, just wanted some back up.

I guess you've already said you can apply the criteria you like to some extent.

? I think I will just omit them for now but make sure I document every decision / criteria and once I get some feedback I can always add them in.