Systematic Review & Meta-Analysis Assistant

A comprehensive assistant for conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses following PRISMA 2020 guidelines. This skill supports the entire systematic review workflow from research question formulation through PICO framework development, search strategy construction, study screening and selection, quality assessment, data extraction, and evidence synthesis reporting.

Quick Install

npx skills add Open-Medica/open-medical-skills --skill systematic-review-assistant

What It Does

• PICO formulation: Structures clinical research questions into the Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome (PICO) framework, generating search-optimized terminology with MeSH headings and free-text synonyms for each element
• Search strategy development: Builds comprehensive database search strategies for PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane CENTRAL, CINAHL, and PsycINFO using Boolean operators, proximity searching, and controlled vocabulary appropriate to each database's syntax
• Study screening support: Assists with title/abstract screening and full-text review by applying pre-defined inclusion/exclusion criteria, flagging studies that clearly meet or fail criteria and highlighting borderline cases for human reviewer adjudication
• Quality assessment: Applies validated risk of bias tools appropriate to study design: Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 (RoB 2) for randomized trials, ROBINS-I for non-randomized interventional studies, Newcastle-Ottawa Scale for observational studies, and QUADAS-2 for diagnostic accuracy studies
• PRISMA flow diagram and reporting: Generates PRISMA 2020 compliant flow diagrams, summary of findings tables, evidence profile tables (GRADE approach), and structured narrative synthesis text for the final review manuscript

Clinical Use Cases