Scoping Reviews

In a systematic search, you will need to keep the search as similar as possible between different databases. In practice, you should only need to change a few things for each database:

• Applying consistent search limiters to each database
• Searching the same fields in each database
• Applying the controlled vocabulary of each database

As experts in database searching, librarians can help you translate your search string between different databases.

Information Sources and Methods

• Database name
• Date of search and searcher's name
• Study registries searches
• Grey literature sources searched
• Any other method used to find additional information, such as searching specific journals or citation chasing from specific articles

Search Strategies

• Full search strings
• Search limiters used (such as publication date range or language)
• Updates to the search (such as redoing the search at a later date or using search alerts
• Number of results retrieved from each search

Managing Records

• How search results were organized
• What reference managers or other tools were used
• How results were de-duplicated

Citation managers are tools that can help you stay organized during the searching stage of a systematic review. They can be used to

• Keep track of pilot and test searches
• Collect together all your searches from different databases
• De-deduplicate your search results