A case study of the organisation of research knowledge by systematic reviews within the mental health care field.

BACKGROUND: Our aim was to explore how systematic reviews of the effects of complex interventions within the field of organisation of mental health care organised research knowledge. METHODS: We looked up references included in 14 mental health care reviews in the database Epistemonikos to examine overlap between reviews. We classified topic concordance between study reports and reviews as similar, narrower, broader or other topic to indicate how well the research knowledge was organised. FINDINGS: We examined 182 comparisons between the theme of study reports and reviews. In 100 (55%) of the 182 comparisons, the review had a broader theme, 18 (10%) narrower, 34 (19%) similar and in 30 (16%), the review's theme was classified as 'other'. The content analysis indicated that there existed (inconsistent) overlapping of study reports between different topics. CONCLUSIONS: Within the field organisation of mental health care, there exists some unclear and inconsistent organisation of current knowledge. This may diminish the validity and reliability of systematic reviews. It is important that review authors take care in defining the review question precisely, conduct thorough literature searches, consider each study's hypothesis, disciplinary tradition and context, and if necessary, examine which other reviews have included a study in question.