When conducting a literature search for a systematic review, you will need to be as comprehensive as possible in your searching. The resources on this page will give you helpful information on how to achieve the most comprehensive results in your searches of the health sciences literature.
Essential Databases
Any literature search for a systematic review must include comprehensive searches of the PubMed and CINAHL databases. Additional databases that you may also wish to search are:
Academic Search Complete (a multidisciplinary database that indexes some health sciences journals, and some grey literature)
PsycInfo (the premier Psychology database--use if your clinical question has psychosocial aspects)
ERIC (the premier Education database--use if your clinical question has school nursing aspects)
JSTOR (a multidisciplinary scholarly-only database).
General Advice
Because the PubMed interface to Medline contains the abstracts for articles not yet fully indexed for Medline, we recommend that you use the PubMed interface (rather than the EBSCO interface) to Medline when running literature searches for your systematic reviews. This ensures that you will see the absolute most recent research on your topic.
Because you are working in groups on your systematic review, it is also recommended that you create a spreadsheet containing your search strategy in Google Drive and give access to all the members of your group so that you can collaborate without worrying about version control, etc. If you need help getting started with or using Google Drive click here.
The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health has a site with excellent resources for literature searches for systematic reviews: Finding the Evidence: Literature Searching Tools in Support of Systematic Reviews
