engleski

Guidelines, position papers and critical reviews: differences and similarities

Critical reviews or systematic reviews are usually written by a group of authors who are not appointed by a society or an official body, although such a possibility also exists. They should comprehensively scrutinize the existing medical literature dealing with certain topics aiming at identifying and synthesizing all relevant information.15 An evidence-based approach is essential for drawing conclusions for this type of paper as it is for position papers/expert consensus documents. The data in all published literature must be evaluated for its strengths, weaknesses and validity. A critical review can be comprehensive to various degrees and the time range of material analysed but it usually tries to answer a single clinical question. This is different from the guidelines (but also from the majority of position papers/expert consensus documents), which answer a series of questions in order to help practitioners to make decisions about a range of diagnostic and/or therapeutic interventions. Different databases can be used for literature searching such as PubMed, Medline, Embase, etc. Although similarly to guidelines and position papers/expert consensus documents the prerequisite for data to be included into such a critical review is their high quality and credibility, for this type of paper no restrictions exist that must necessarily be followed when guidelines are produced. Therefore, for example it is not necessary to consider only peer reviewed literature or to avoid abstracts. On the other hand, even in this type of paper, reports that are anecdotal should not be quoted, neither should repetition be made of data from literature which may not stand up to the scrutiny of sound scientific evaluation. In this type of paper the recommendations are not graded according to different classes and linked to their levels of evidence.

guidelines; position papers; critical reviews

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