Abstract
Systematic review articles (SRs) are becoming increasingly important to clinical practice. A hand search of the core health care journals was done to assess number and type of SRs for 2000. Many more SRs are being published but they are concentrated in The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) and a few core clinical journals. Their topics are also concentrated on therapy issues rather than other categories of health research. Background: SRs have assumed increasing importance for evidence-based patient care and services decisions. They summarize data from all quality-assessed studies for a health problem and provide scientific synthesis.