ABSTRACT
Over two million articles are published each year in 20,000 biomedical journals (Mulrow 1994). Some form of summary of this information is clearly essential. Even if a clinician or researcher restricted their reading to high-yield clinical psychiatry journals, they would need to read over 5,000 articles a year (Geddes et al. 1999a). This is clearly impossible for the majority of clinicians who have around 30 minutes a week to keep up to date with the latest developments (Sackett et al. 1997). There is an obvious need, with such a wealth of information, for reliable reviews of the literature. Systematic reviews attempt to address this need for reliable summaries of primary research.
