Abstract
The clinical ethics literature is striking for the absence of an important genre of scholarship that is common to the literature of clinical medicine: systematic reviews. As a consequence, the field of clinical ethics lacks the internal, corrective effect of review articles that are designed to reduce potential bias. This article inaugurates a new section of the annual “Clinical Ethics” issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy on systematic reviews. Using recently articulated standards for argument-based normative ethics, we provide a systematic review of the literature on concealed medication for the management of psychiatric disorders. Four steps are completed:
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identify a focused question;
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conduct a literature search using key terms relevant to the focused question;
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assess the adequacy of the argument-based methods of the papers identified; and
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identify conclusions drawn in each paper and whether they apply to the focused question.