You may be doing a systematic review as part of you course or you may be looking to publish.

Consider the following if you wish to pursue publication of the review:  

• Find a journal which publishes systematic reviews in your subject area
• Will that journal reach the right readership - a specialist journal may reach a smaller but more influential subject audience than a generalist journal for example.
• How have other systematic reviews been presented in these journals, consider using the same headings or format
• Confirm if the journal has guidelines for authors which would need to be followed in order to have your systematic review published
• For further clarification check with your supervisor or tutor.

To help with the writing up part of your systematic review take a look at other reviews published by the Cochrane Library to see how the results should be presented.

Use the same types of section headings and format - it is a tried and tested method.

You should be very clear about:

• What kind of review you have done
• Why you did this kind of review

One school of thought is that a meta-analysis is a better option for a review but it is not always possible to do this with the results you find. You need to justify what you have done. If you do a narrative analysis and a meta-analysis was possible, then one of your conclusions might be, that the next step should be to carry out a meta-analysis but say why you did not do this initially.