– Students have performed a systematic review, where they searched literature, identified articles of interest, and extracted relevant data of interest. We are looking to have this written for a publication in the journal “PlosOne”.
– There is no standardization or guidelines on how systematic reviews of pharmacoeconomics studies are conducted. Different researchers perform this differently. The current study is to perform a systematic review of the pharmacoeconomics systematic reviews in the area of cancer as an example of one practice area where cost is particularly important.
– The objective is to analyze the trends and patterns of how the pharmacoeconomics systematic reviews are conducted in literature in relation to designs and methodological aspects, and how data are aggregated and conclusions are made. What things are done similarly and what things are done differently? What are the observed limitations in such systematic reviews that affect the validity, quality of interpretation and generalizability of results? How future systematic reviews can be enhanced? Also, a quality assessment is performed.
– No evidence or practice recommendations are generated from this study.
– While there is no specific quality assessment tool for the pharmacoeconomics systematic reviews, the quality of included systematic reviews was assessed using the AMSTAR tool for systematic reviews.