The executive summary should be a comprehensive yet concise summary of the purpose, scope, methods, findings and implications of the systematic review. It should contain no abbreviations or references, be limited to 500 words and accurately reflect the review content. The executive summary includes the following headings:
Background
Objectives
Inclusion criteria
Participants
Intervention or Phenomena of interest
Context or Consequences
Types of text and opinion papers
Search strategy
Methodological quality
Data collection
Data synthesis
Results
Conclusions
Implications for practice
Implications for research
Keywords
Summary of findings table
Systematic reviews of text and opinion should consider presenting the final synthesized findings in a summary of findings table. This will be graded according to the ConQual approach for establishing confidence in the output of textual synthesis and presented in a Summary of Findings table. (Munn et al, 2014)
Table 4.1 ConQual summary of findings table
