The Dietary Reference Intakes for Koreans (KDRIs), a set of reference intake values, have served as a basis for guiding a balanced diet that promotes health and prevents disease in the general Korean population. In the process of developing DRIs, a systematic review has played an important role in helping the DRI committees make evidence-based and transparent decisions for updating the next DRIs. Thus, the 2015 KDRI steering committee applied the systematic review framework to the revision process of the KDRIs. The purpose of this article is to summarize the revision process for the 2015 KDRIs by focusing on the systematic review framework.

The methods used to develop the systematic review framework for 2015 KDRIs followed the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Tufts Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC). The framework for systematic review of the 2015 KDRIs comprised of the 3 following steps: (1) development of an analytic framework and refinement of key questions and search terms; (2) literature search and data extraction; and, (3) appraisal of the literature and summarizing the results.

A total of 203,237 studies were retrieved through the above procedure, with 2,324 of these studies included in the analysis. General information, main results, comments of reviewers, and results of quality assessment were extracted and organized by study design. The average points of quality appraisals were 3.0 (range, 0–5) points for intervention, 6.1 (0–9) points for cohort, 6.0 (3–9) points for nested case-control, 5.4 (1–8) points for case-control, 14.6 (0–22) points for cross-sectional studies, and 7.0 (0–11) points for reviews.

Systematic review helped to establish the 2015 KDRIs as a useful tool for evidence-based approach. Collaborative efforts to improve the framework for systematic review should be continued for future KDRIs.