Systematic and Literature Reviews

Where should you search?

For systematic  and scoping reviews you must search multiple databases. At a minumum:

• Medline or PubMed (not both, they have the same content)

plus at least two of...

• Embase
• CINAHL for nursing and allied health topics
• PsycInfo for psychiatry and mental health topics
• The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (if topic includes RCT'S)
• subject specific databases
• local (national or regional) databases

You should also consider:

• grey literature 
  • grey literature can be hard to find. See our grey literature guide and using Google for Research for some sources and tips. 
  • Searching Grey Literature - Meta-evidence blog.
• articles citing key papers - use Google Scholar or CitationChaser to identify citations
  • Note. Scholar is easy to use but does not allow bulk import into reference managers, CitationChaser does.
  • Scopus and Web of Science are great for tracking citations. The Health Sciences Library does not have these but you may be able to access them via a university affiliation,
• dissertation and theses databases (eg ProQuest Dissertation & Theses Database)
• back issues of key journals
• other trial registries (eg  WHO's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, ClinicalTrials.gov)
  • Trial registries should be searched for unpublished trials to reduce influencing results by publication bias.
  • Searching clinical trials registers: guide for systematic reviewers. BMJ 2022

Searches should be saved for each database so that search strategies can be reproduced in the final report. Records should also be kept of when key searches were carried out.

In order to be as comprehensive as possible it is recommended that searches are as broad as possible with inclusion or exclusion decided at the screening stage. Tightly targeted searches risk failing to identify relevant papers.