Nazarbayev University LibGuides: Systematic Reviews: Search

Plan your Search

Conducting a systematic review is a complex task that demands expertise in search methods across multiple databases. Proper preparation involves:

Choosing the appropriate databases (at least two)
Understanding the search techniques for each database
Developing an effective search strategy
Recording the search process and history.

Librarians can assist you with selection of databases, search strategies and duplicates in the search results, managing references among others. You can also check available tutorials provided for the databases.

Find additional tips on planning your search on the image to the right.

Core Biomedical Databases

Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window
The Cochrane Library is a collection of six databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making and a seventh database that provides information about Cochrane groups. Cochrane Library Training
Cochrane Clinical Answers are the focused entry points to rigorous research from Cochrane systematic reviews. Each Cochrane Clinical Answer contains a clinical question, a short answer, and an opportunity to ‘drill down’ to the evidence from relevant Cochrane reviews. Visit Cochrane Clinical Answer
PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed comprises over 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources.
Scopus This link opens in a new window
Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, features smart tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Scopus delivers the most comprehensive overview of the world's research output in the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities. As research becomes increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative, you can make sure that critical research from around the world is not missed.

Grey Literature

Examples of grey literature include conference abstracts, presentations, proceedings; regulatory data; unpublished trial data; government publications; reports (such as white papers, working papers, internal documentation); dissertations/theses; patents; and policies & procedures; publications that are not controlled by commercial publishers. Inclusion of grey literature into a systematic review is recommended in order to help minimize publication bias, provide local, new, first-hand information. It is good to acknowledge the use of "grey" sources and search path including search engines to ensure their reproducibility.

Bibliographic Databases with Conference Indexing and Abstracting:

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

The approval process for new drugs and devices involves submission of data that might not be published elsewhere. These documents can help identify publication bias even when complete methodological details of unpublished trials are unavailable. This information is not available prior to a drug’s approval and may be heavily redacted; however, when available, reviewers can compare results of published and unpublished trials.

OpenTrialsFDA

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Center for Research Libraries

Collections of newspapers, journals, dissertations, archives, government publications, and other traditional and digital resources.

Official Information Sources of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Kazakhstan (in Russian and Kazakh)

Open Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan (in Russian and Kazakh)

HSRProj : Health Services Research Projects in Progress
NIH Reporter

Online trial registries may include results of completed but unpublished clinical trials. These resources can be helpful in identifying otherwise unreachable trials and provide additional details of published trials. Many individual drug companies also have posted trial registries on their websites, although their quality varies. Even without results, knowledge that the trial exists can be helpful for reviewers, because they can contact the principal investigator for more information.

AstraZeneca Clinical Trials

ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com (CSDR) - Access to clinical trial data, including patient data from 5 pharmaceutical companies for pre-approved researchers.

ClinicalTrials.gov

GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Study Register

Janssen Clinical Trial Data – for Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Companies

Open Trials (Beta)

WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP)

Yale University Open Data Access (YODA)

Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ)
Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Database Overview

Centre for Reviews and Dissemination.
National Technical Information Service (NTIS)

NYAM: Grey Lit Report

Home, dedicated search

Catalog Search: Reports collected from a long list of organizations

Note: no longer being added to as of January 2017

Repositories are collections of research produced by an institution's researchers. Institutions can be governmental, organizational, and academic, such as Universities. Often contain electronic theses.

Nazarbayev University Repository

Nazarbayev University Repository is an institutional electronic archive for long term storage, accumulation and provision of long-term and reliable open access to scientific research results and intellectual products of the academic community of Nazarbayev University associated with them.

OAIster

Records for items in digital libraries, institutional repositories.

OpenGrey Repository

European grey lit (reports, dissertations, conference papers, etc) large archival section, 2004 or earlier, started adding new material in 2014 from partner institutions.

Search Tips

PICO Method

Without a well-focused question, it could be difficult and time-consuming to identify appropriate resources and search for relevant evidence. Practitioners of Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) use a specialized model framework, called PICO, to form the question and facilitate the literature search. Learn more from PICO libguide.

P	Patient, Population, or Problem	How would I describe a group of patients similar to mine?
I	Intervention, Prognostic Factor, or Exposure	Which main intervention, prognostic factor, or exposure am I considering?
C	Comparison or Intervention (if appropriate)	What is the main alternative to compare with the intervention?
O	Outcome you would like to measure or achieve	What can I hope to accomplish, measure, improve, or affect?
	What Type of question are you asking?	Diagnosis, Etiology/Harm, Therapy, Prognosis, Prevention
	Type of Study you want to find	What would be the best study design/methodology?

Advanced search techniques

Learn from libguide on developing keywords and use of Boolean Operators, and MeSH which is used in medical databases such as PubMED.

1. Plural or singular (Ex. disease - diseases).

It is recommended to use the MeSH database. There you will see

the term as it is defined for MeSH
the entry terms (terms are similar to the name of the MeSH, but they are not subject headings. They are not automatically searched when you use the MeSH term. These are alternate terms, synonyms and variations that you should consider utilizing as keywords).

MeSH Infection Control Practitioners.

Entry term Practitioner, Infection Control; Practitioners, Infection Control; Infection Control Practitioner (see att).

2. MESH search OR All fields search might be important for a number of reasons:

You will find articles that have not yet been indexed in PubMed: MeSH terms have not yet been assigned to them.
It is not possible to cover all concepts with a single MeSH term.
A MeSH term may not have been assigned to articles, despite the fact that they are related to the topic.
Using only MeSH in PubMed will retrieve the articles indexed in MEDLINE only.

disease [MeSH] OR disease [All fields]

3. MeSH will not help if the topic is new or rare. MeSH will help if the topic is complicated or broad/large.

Manage references and Search history

Document your search to keep valuable results, reproduce or modify your search. According to PRISMA 2020 Statement, the you have to record

databases used
date of search
dates of coverage provided by each database
search terms used
total publications found
number of relevant publications
limits applied

Create accounts in the databases you are searching in to save search and references locally

Reference managers EndNote, Zotero and Mendeley assist you with

Collecting and saving citations from multiple literature databases (e.g., PubMed or Web of Science, Scopus, Cochrane)
Eliminating duplicate references from multiple databases
Formatting citation styles.

Learn more from the libguide Citation styles and tools

Reference

The content of this page contain information and ideas from Systematic Reviews by Amsterdam UMC.