المراجعات الممنهجة في بحوث علم النفس في العالم العربي

Abstract EN

Objective : The study attempted to introduce systematic review and explain its standards, steps, importance, characteristics, and its differences with similar type of methodologies, and to assess the overall quality of these systematic reviews against 19 standards extracted from the American Psychological Association (APA) and Cochrane Policy Institute.

Methods : The study identified 32 Arabic systematic reviews covering a wide range of psychological topics.

These were written by Arab and non-Arab researchers and published in international and regional journals.

Results : Regardless of some exceptions, the overall quality evaluation of these systematic reviews revealed good compliance with the 19 standards, showing reasonable awareness of how to conduct them.

The most compliant with the standards were searching with keywords; using electronic databases; identifying restrictions and criteria for including and excluding; and declaring explicit evidence statements.

The less compliant with the standards were demonstrating inter-rater reliability and consistency of data extraction; evaluating the results; explicit assessments of quality of evidence for the review findings; and identifying possible sources of bias.

Most of the international journals that published these reviews had high rankings.

Conclusion : the study urges regional journals and fund agencies to encourage and support authors to conduct more systematic reviews, and to establish review journals in the Arab region.