Evidence Synthesis : Executing the Search

The search strategy will be reported on in the methods section of your paper. Therefore, it is crucial to have a well thought out and documented search strategy. 

Search tips to keep in mind when developing your search strategy:

• Include all concepts in your search
  • Having a well developed research question will help
• Include both keywords and subject headings
  • Keywords broaden your results and will be searched for in journal titles, author names, article titles and article abstracts. 
  • Subject terms will narrow your results and will look for sources that have had a specific term applied by a cataloger/indexer
• Include spelling variations
  • Behavior, Behaviour 
• Use truncation and spelling variations
  • Child*
• Use phrase searching when necessary 
  • "Social Media"
• Use boolean operators effectively
  • "AND" narrows the search
  • "OR" broadens the search
  • "NOT" excludes terms
• Use limiters provided by the database in order to tailor your search results further
• Adapt the search strategy as needed for each database

Systematic reviews should be replicable. You will need to document the search process for each database, including all search terms & variations, how many results you retrieved for each search, how many records were duplicates, & the final number of results that you used for your first pass.  PRISMA provides guidelines on the information you will need to include.