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• 3. Conduct your search

  The search is arguably the most important element of a well-produced systematic review.  A good search should be:

  Highly Sensitive, it should retrieve the most papers for your question, with the risk of retrieving irrelevant papers. These papers should be removed via screening.

  Reproducible, it should be well documented and able to be repeated

  Tested, to ensure that key papers have not been overlooked, or key subject terms missed.

  Many protocols also recommend that a search is produced in collaboration with an information professional such as a skilled researcher or librarian.

  Review the Systematic Literature Searching LibGuide for a more comprehensive guide on this topic, as we will only cover elements related to Systematic Reviews. An excellent paper to review is the PRESS Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies: 2015 Guideline Statement from the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, which includes a handy 'best practice' checklist.

  The Below example is also a very summarised version of the comprehensive Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy

  Important!

  At every stage of your search, note down the database and the number of results found. This will make producing a PRISMA flow diagram easier. Export your results as a .RIS file. Also, drop your search strategy into a word document (a simple copy and paste works).

  This will help you document your search strategy, and ensure reproducability

  The guidance How do I export a large number of results from EBSCO databases to EndNote? may help streamline the exporting of abstracts.

  If you are exporting from a Non-EBSCO database, The NIHR ARC-NWC helpsheet How to export large numbers of records from bibliographic databases is of use.

  Key elements of a Highly Sensitive Search

   

  

   

  In a basic HSSS, you will always see these elements (They can be complex in many cases with proximity searching and boolean, but the search tends to follow this format)

  The top search box is the Subject Term. Always search through the subject term/thesaurus and add any relevant subject terms. If you are given the option to 'explode' (include all the subheadings) always consider this. You can choose not to but document your reasons why.

  The next two boxes are set to search through the Title and Abstract. Normally this is the default search however if a subject is very new you can search 'all fields' as it might bring in a few additional author keywords. This search is a 'free text' search and features a few elements common to HSSS searches:

  Brackets. These ensure that search strings inside the brackets are performed first, almost like a mini search within a search. Use these to ensure your search string does not do anything unexpected.

  Plurals. You can add a * to also retrieve plurals and other words 'starting with'. If you are curious that adding a * to your word might retrieve irrelevant papers you can use a crossword solver website such as WordHippo to investigate words 'starting with'.

   

  Proximity/Adjacent Operator.  This is a special operator such as N, ADJ or NEAR (Depends on database which you can use to search for search terms within N words of each other. This allows you to search for words in proximity with each other, I.E. (Health* N3 Literat*) will retrieve "health literacy", "literate health worker" and "healthy and literate". See the Systematic Searching LibGuide for further information.

  Although useful in Quantitative research topics, Proximity searching can be very useful in Qualitative subjects dealing with conceptual topics that might have the same research subject described in many different ways. You can increase the N or ADJ operator to take into account  qualitative topics (feelings and opinions) that may not be in as close proximity to each other. A good starting point is N3 for Quantitative and N5 for Qualitative topics. See LibAnswers