 For this course, you're going to do a rapid review of the literature to synthesize evidence to answer a PICO research question. Here's what that means. Rapid reviews are a form of evidence synthesis that may provide more timely information for decision-making compared with standard systematic reviews. The methods of conducting rapid reviews varies widely and are typically done in less than five weeks. Often policy makers require a short deadline and a systematic review for synthesizing evidence is not practical. A rapid review speeds up the systematic review process by emitting stages of the systematic review making it less rigorous. Systematic reviews, on the other hand, take a lot of time and money. They can cost a lot depending on how many outcomes you have. Within public health, researchers often use them for our knowledge users. Perhaps you'll be working for a governmental body that needs to make a decision in a short amount of time. In that case, we could tailor our methods to make sure we can produce something in line with their decision-making. Bottom line, rapid reviews compared to systematic reviews are faster and less expensive. Here are the main steps you'll follow for a rapid review. Step one, identify a research topic and frame a narrow PICO question. Step two, select your study inclusion and exclusion criteria. Some criteria to consider include time period, language, location, age range, animal or human studies, and a type of published materials. Step three, create a study search protocol using keywords from your PICO question. Step four, plan and execute a literature search using the PubMed database. One helpful tip is remembering to store all your citations so that you can maintain a record of them. Also be sure to document the number of articles you identified. Step five is your first round of screening literature. As you're looking through articles, read over the various titles and abstracts that come up in your initial search. This is how you'll eventually get to the point of selecting eligible peer-reviewed journal articles. Also, in this stage, be sure to document the number of articles excluded and why they were excluded. In the sixth step, you'll need to screen the literature again, but in a more detailed way. You'll need to start reading the full text of the article selected, again by applying your eligibility criteria to include or exclude articles. One tip, record the number of articles excluded and the total number of articles retained. This should be no less than nine. The last steps are explained in more detail in Canvas Module 3. This is where you'll start to write about the studies that made it through your screening process and come up with the common themes. Remember, research is a messy process as the first video explains. You may need to go back and modify some of your searches and or steps along the way before a suitable search protocol can be finalized. If you aren't getting enough articles to answer your PICO question, this is usually a sign that your search strategy may need to be evaluated. If you need help finding sources or with your research in general, you can always meet with your librarian. Go to library.usu.edu and click on Meet with a Librarian and search for Aaron Davis.