Systematic Reviews Demystified: Conducting Systematic Reviews on HIV Infection and AIDS

Physicians, researchers, public health practitioners and patients are deluged with unmanageable amounts of information about the best approaches to prevention, treatment and health care delivery. Over the last 30 years, there has been an exponential rise in the number of published scientific articles across health fields. There have been 131,000 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) completed since 1948,1 over 2 million articles are published annually in the biomedical literature in over 20,000 journals,2 and over 3,330 journals are indexed in MEDLINE.