Developing and documenting a well thought out and constructed search strategy is a crucial component of conducting a systematic review. A well developed search strategy will ensure that all relevant studies are identified and considered. It will also allow others to replicate the searches conducted.
We recommend that you:
- conduct some preliminary exploratory searches and review results and identify some relevant studies. This will help when you test your search strategy to ensure it finds those studies.
- review the documented search strategies of relevant published reviews to see what search terms they used.
Key Steps
A comprehensive search strategy involves:
These steps (3.1 - 3.3) are listed on the left.