Systematic Reviews

There are features on databases or eResources that will make your searches more productive.  Investigate them for your resource.

Check out:

• Advance searching - use the fields to make your search more precise - eg author field, subject field, txt (text) field, etc
• Use the thesaurus or MESH headings to find the best terms to search
• Filtering  your search by date (bear in mind your stated inclusion/exclusion criteria)
• Filtering your search by language
• Filtering your search by publication
• Filtering your search by country of publication
• Peer review!

Do not filter by full-text - you can get articles via inter-library loan where the library does not have them in the collection

Create a personal account on the eResource (database) where you can save your search results, searches and set up search alerts to let you know when new articles are added.  (Create a separate spreadsheet for backup- though!).

Create a RefWorks account and export your results to it. 

Your information librarian will be able to advise with all of these points.

An Audit Trail is a document you use to track your search activity and will help feed into the start of the PRISMA process.

Simply create an Excel spreadsheet or a table within Word with the following columns:

• Date of search - you may record the same search on different dates to see if additional materials have become available
• Database/eResource used - you should be searching across 4 or 5 different databases
• Search string - copy the full search string entered including connectors, brackets and punctuation
• Limiters applied - record any limiters ticked such as publication date, peer reviewed etc.
• Number of records retrieved - the total number of results returned from the combination of the database, search string and limiters

A copy of your Audit Trail should go in the appendix of your assignment

All databases (eResources) have tools to improve your searching.  

Use the onboard help to find out how your database  deals with proximity searching (how close words appear next to each other) and controlled language ( thesaurus, MESH headings, Subject terms) All of these can improve your searches.  The basic " " quote marks will work for all databases. 

Contact library.support@Solent for more advice on searching for information