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