Evidence Synthesis and Literature Reviews in the Health Sciences

You should carefully document your search strategy. It is important that your search be reproducible by other researchers. You should carefully document the items listed below. Detailed instructions for each step are included below.

The full PRISMA-S guidelines are available at https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-020-01542-z

1. The full name of the database

2. The platform on which the database was run

3. The date of the search, including the date of the most recent searches if the search was updated during the course of the review

4. Search strategy exactly as it was run in the database

5. Any filters or limits that were applied

6. The number of search results
   
   The list above is a sub-set of the PRISMA-S guidelines. The list comes from the online course Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analysis Open + Free from the Open Learning Initiative. The list is used under the Creative Commons License.

In general, the name of the database is what is listed in the link from the Booth Library website. However, make sure you are only searching one database at a time. EBSCO allows you to search multiple databases at once. You should only search one database at a time so that you correctly record the search string for each database.

Many databases at Booth Library, such as CINAHL, are provided on the EBSCOhost platform. PubMed is only available on the PubMed platform. However, there are some databases, such as ERIC, that are available across several platforms. It is important to document the platform for each database. There are platform-specific search commands and syntax. You must record the database platform so that your search can be reproduced.

Evidence synthesis projects are time consuming, so the "date of the search" is generally two separate dates:
1. The date the search was finalized and saved
2. The last time the search was updated

Refining your search strategy will be a long process. The date you finalize the strategy and capture the set of results used for analysis is the date of search. Record this date in your project notes.

It is expected that your project will last weeks, months, or years. The search should be regularly run again to get the date the search was last updated.

Please see the librarian for information on creating saved searches and search alerts to automate re-running searches.

In general, you will use the "Search History" feature to find your search strategy. For PubMed, be sure to click the arrow for "Details" to get the full search.

Filters and limits are often check boxes or links that you click. Any filters or limits will be listed in your search history.

CINAHL lists limits as "Narrow by." It is good practice to also document that the search was run with "apply equivalent subjects."

PubMed includes the filters in the Details section of the search history.

Recording the number of results for your search is necessary to check that your search is reproducible. You should get the same number of results when you re-run a search.