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• Search Strategy Testing

  During your literature search, you should consider search strategy testing by selecting 6-10 high-impact papers and checking that the papers are included in your search. These are often referred to as 'gold standard papers'.

   

  How do I select my gold standard papers?

  This is up to you, but your Faculty Librarian can advise. The papers should always be considered a 'strong include' in your systematic review, and can be found by reviewing references in other high-quality systematic reviews, via a Google Scholar search, by identifying papers with high numbers of citations or simply by including well-known, high-impact papers.

   

  How do I do I search strategy test?

  Search your database with the title of the paper in quotation marks "Health literacy: a necessity for increasing participation in health care". You will usually only get one result.

  Then combine this with your final search with AND and if the 1 remains, the paper is included in your search.

   

  All my papers are included, what do I do now?

  Congratulations. Looks like your search was excellent. You now have a tested highly sensitive search.

   

  A few papers were not included in my search?

  Review the abstract and keywords. You may have missed a search term. In qualitative research this is quite common as terminology is less strict, however introducing 'adjacent' or 'near field' searching can improve the search without increasing the number of search results too much.

   

  Reporting

  Report on the strategy testing with a short line in the paper or protocol. "Search strategy testing was performed with a gold standard set of references identified by a (insert method here) and agreed with all members of the team"