NICE Evidence Reviews Collection

Evidence reviews for NICE guidelines summarise the evidence, its strengths and limitations and provide a summary of how the NICE guideline committee has interpreted the evidence in light of any uncertainties to make recommendations for practice.

The evidence identified during systematic searches of the published literature and from other sources is reviewed against a pre-specified review protocol to identify the most appropriate evidence to answer the review questions. They address only the key issues and questions covered in the scope of the guideline, and will usually be structured with a recognised framework (for example, using PICO or SPICE).

The evidence review process used to inform NICE guidelines is explicit, transparent and involves 6 main steps:

• Agreeing the review protocol with the NICE guideline committee
• Identifying and selecting relevant evidence
• Critical appraisal of all included evidence
• Extracting and synthesising the results
• Assessing quality/certainty in the evidence
• Interpreting the results.

Further details can be found in Developing NICE guidelines: the manual