"The second edition of The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions contains essential guidance for preparing and maintaining Cochrane Reviews of the effects of health interventions. Designed to be an accessible resource, the Handbook will also be of interest to anyone undertaking systematic reviews of interventions outside Cochrane, and many of the principles and methods presented are appropriate for systematic reviews addressing research questions other than effects of interventions. This fully updated edition contains extensive new material on systematic review methods addressing a wide-range of topics including network meta-analysis, equity, complex interventions, narrative synthesis, and automation. Also new to this edition, integrated throughout the Handbook, is the set of standards Cochrane expects its reviews to meet."-- Provided by publisher.

"This work is a co-publication between The Cochrane Collaboration and John Wiley & Sons Ltd"--Title page verso.

Starting a review -- Determining the scope of the review and the questions it will address -- Defining the criteria for including studies and how they will be grouped for the synthesis -- Searching for and selecting studies -- Collecting data -- Choosing effect measures and computing estimates of effect -- Considering bias and conflicts of interest among the included studies -- Assessing risk of bias in a randomized trial -- Summarizing study characteristics and preparing for synthesis -- Analysing data and undertaking meta-analyses -- Undertaking network meta-analyses -- Synthesizing and presenting findings using other methods -- Assessing risk of bias due to missing results in a synthesis -- Completing 'Summary of findings' tables and grading the certainty of the evidence -- Interpreting results and drawing conclusions -- Equity and specific populations -- Intervention complexity -- Patient-reported outcomes -- Adverse effects -- Economics evidence -- Qualitative research and Cochrane Reviews -- Prospective approaches to accumulating evidence -- Including variants on randomized trials -- Including non-randomized studies on intervention effects -- Assessing risk of bias in a non-randomized study -- Individual participant data.