School of Nursing and Academic Division of Midwifery
Step four involves summarising the evidence.
It is useful to use data extraction forms for the following reasons:
Reviewers should use a double-abstraction process. This is where two independant reviewers extract the data for each study. The forms can be checked against each other and differences identified and corrected.
No two forms are the same, however, the forms should contain the following key components:
It is important that all forms should be pilot tested using a representative sample of the studies to be reviewed. This will save a lot of time later!