Systematic Reviews Informing Occupational Therapy Sally Bennett, Tammy Hoffmann, Annie McCluskey, Nicole Coghlan, Leigh Tooth MeSH TERMS  databases, bibliographic  evidence-based practice  meta-analysis as topic  occupational therapy  reviews Sally Bennett, PhD, is Senior Lecturer, University of Queensland, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Division of Occupational Therapy, St. Lucia, Queensland 4072 Australia; sally.bennett@uq.edu.au Tammy Hoffmann, PhD, is Associate Professor, Centre for Research in Evidence-Based Practice, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University, Robina, Queensland, Australia. Annie McCluskey, PhD, MA, DipCOT, is Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Sydney, Cumberland Campus, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Nicole Coghlan is Honours Student, University of Queensland, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Division of Occupational Therapy, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia. Leigh Tooth, PhD, is Senior Research Fellow, University of Queensland, School of Population Health, Herston, Queensland, Australia. OBJECTIVE. We sought to identify and describe the number, topics, and publishing trends of systematic reviews relevant to occupational therapy indexed in the OTseeker database. METHOD. We performed a cross-sectional survey of the systematic reviews contained in OTseeker in December 2011. RESULTS. Of the 1,940 systematic reviews indexed in OTseeker, only 53 (2.7%) were published in oc- cupational therapy journals. The most common diagnostic categories were stroke (n 5 195, 10.1%) and affective disorders (n 5 204, 10.5%). The most common intervention categories were consumer education (n 5 644, 33.2%) and psychosocial techniques (n 5 571, 29.4%). Only 390 (20.1%) of the 1,940 systematic reviews specifically involved occupational therapy. CONCLUSION. Occupational therapists need to search broadly to locate relevant systematic reviews or, alternatively, to use databases such as OTseeker. Clarity about the involvement of occupational therapy in reports of future research will improve the ability to identify occupational therapy research for all stakeholders. Finally, occupational therapy practitioners need to read systematic reviews critically to determine whether review conclusions are justified. Bennett, S., Hoffmann, T., McCluskey, A., Coghlan, N., & Tooth, L. (2013). Systematic reviews informing occupational therapy. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 67, 345–354. http://dx.doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2013.005819 A major challenge facing health professionals is the sheer quantity of new research being published each year. In the Medline bibliographic database, for instance, approximately 700,000 references were added in 2010 alone (U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2011). This volume of research places tremen- dous pressure on health care practitioners, including occupational therapists and occupational therapy assistants, as they attempt to incorporate research evidence into practice (Bastian, Glasziou, & Chalmers, 2010; Holm, 2000; Ottenbacher, Tickle-Degnen, & Hasselkus, 2002). Methods for efficiently lo- cating, accessing, filtering, and interpreting research are critical if practitioners are to integrate research evidence with their clinical expertise, client values, and information from the clinical context (Straus, Richardson, Glasziou, & Haynes, 2005). Systems for synthesizing this information have become essential. The long tradition of using literature reviews to help readers grasp the breadth of a topic is unlikely to slow, and systematic reviews have become an important method for rigorously synthesizing the literature (Mulrow, Cook, & Davidoff, 1997). Systematic reviews involve the use of explicit, reproducible, and uniformly applied criteria in searching for and selecting articles for review, appraising risk of bias within individual studies, and synthesizing the results of primary studies to provide a concise summary of the available research evidence (Crowther & Cook, 2007). When possible, systematic reviews use meta-analysis, a statistical method that combines the results of two or more primary studies and provides a more precise estimate of effect than results from individual studies (Bennett, Leicht Doyle, & O’Connor, 2010). The American Journal of Occupational Therapy 345