Before you develop your search strategy, it is important to start by doing some preliminary searching to locate resources that align with your research topic. This will help you understand the availability of existing literature and will enable you to build a set of seed references.
These key articles can then be used to test your search strategy. Did these articles appear in your results? If not, this may indicate a problem with your strategy. Have you:
Submitting the search strategy used in your review for peer review helps to add veracity to your search and to eliminate bias . You can get a librarian, or someone outside your review team, to check the search strategies by following the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) checklist linked below.
The search strategy for a systematic review needs to be as comprehensive as possible in order to capture all studies relevant to the review question, and to limit bias. The strategy also needs to be transparent, rigorous, replicable and documented.
The general process in developing a search strategy is:
Tip: A useful starting point can be to check the search strategies in published systematic reviews for examples of how searches are structured and how they assist in keyword development.
Please note that the database interfaces in the following video may vary slightly, but their functionality remains the same.
Depending on your review question, you need to consider searching both multidisciplinary and subject-specific databases:
Databases that have controlled vocabulary/subject headings:
Databases that do not have a controlled vocabulary or subject headings (must use keyword searching instead):
Grey literature is “information produced by all levels of government, academics, business and industry in electronic and print formats not controlled by commercial publishing” (GreyNet).
Read our Grey Literature Library Guide to help you to:
Handsearching is a critical part of the systematic review process to find materials not found through traditional database searches. It is a manual process to examine and identify further relevant studies and includes:
Read the Cochrane Training Guide to Handsearching in the link below for more information on what it is, who does it, where and what to search and what to do with the results.
Text mining tools use natural language processing and machine learning techniques to analyse large volumes of text data. They can help identify relevant studies, extract data, and synthesise results. However, it's important to note that such tools should be used in conjunction with a human review process to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the findings.
Tools accessible to Southern Cross University researchers:
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