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This guide focuses on the process for finding studies to include in systematic and scoping reviews and Health Technology Assessments (HTAs). For guidance regarding preparation of a review, visit the Preparing for a Comprehensive Literature Review guide.
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Librarian Support for Comprehensive ReviewsAre you planning a comprehensive review (systematic, scoping, literature review)? University of Alberta librarians will help you get started. This link describes services available.
Searching Process
The process of searching for studies to include in a Systematic Review, Scoping Review, or Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) may include:
- Checking previously published Systematic Reviews, Scoping Reviews, and HTAs to determine if your question has already been answered.
- Conduct searches for primary studies in multiple bibliographic databases (e.g. Medline, CINAHL and Scopus).
- Scan reference lists of relevant articles, including articles selected for the review, as well as relevant review articles.
- Check who has cited relevant articles using tools such as Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science.
- Depending on your topic, you will need to search the Grey Literature such as
- Clinical trial registries
- Meeting abstracts and conference proceedings
- Clinical Practice Guidelines
- Theses and Dissertations
- Government Documents
- Institute / Association Websites (e.g. Institute of Health Economics, National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Conference Board of Canada)
- Contact, if necessary
- Authors of Relevant Articles and Reviews
- Principle investigators of ongoing studies
- Pharmaceutical Companies
- Web search engines such as Google
Tools
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CovidenceCovidence is a web-based systematic review manager that provides a platform for importing and independent screening of article records. The software supports the use of customized forms for risk of bias assessment and data extraction and exporting of references and data.
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Medline TransposeThis tool translates Medline search syntaxes to PubMed and PubMed searches to Medline. Most effective for short search strings.
Guides and Worksheets
Refining the question
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PICO Form This form is used as a method of parsing a research question, usually clinical/intervention, into the important concepts, Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcomes. Other versions exist for other kinds of questions.
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Finding Concepts in Your Search Question (Circles Diagram) This form is designed to help visualize the concepts in a search question and how the Boolean operators (AND, OR) are used to create the structure search strategy
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Systematic Review Protocol Template This form is designed to help researchers think through all of the information required before they begin a systematic search.
Database search tips
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Useful tips for searching in common database platforms This chart shows database functions that vary from platform to platform.
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Using Refworks for Systematic Reviews Refworks is a citation management system. University of Alberta's subscription will be expiring October 1, 2021. Researchers using Refworks should be migrating their stored Refworks files to other systems such as Zotero, Mendelay and EndNote.
Preparing for publication
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Syntax Guide for Various Databases This chart lists common database functions and the syntax required to execute them in different databases