More information on Open Access journals available on our writing and publication padlet

Please note you cannot collect any data other than the scoping search before your protocol is approved

Review teams must include expertise in the topic area under review. Topic expertise should not be overly narrow, to ensure that all relevant perspectives are considered. Perspectives from different disciplines can help to avoid assumptions or terminology stemming from an over-reliance on a single discipline. Review teams should also include expertise in systematic review methodology, including statistical expertise. Chapter 1 of the Cochrane handbook has more information on this Chapter 1: Starting a review | Cochrane

• the rationale for the review

• key questions broken into PICO (or other structured research question) components

• inclusion/exclusion criteria

• literature searches for published/unpublished literature

• data abstraction/data management

• assessment of methodological quality/risk of bias of individual studies (not required for scoping reviews)

• data synthesis

• grading the evidence for each key question

More information on this can be found on the PRISMA website in the PRISMA-P extension

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The Royal Surrey Library team can also help you with your evidence searches by providing training or carrying out the search for you. Fill in this form to request an evidence search, or email us at rsc-tr.library@nhs.net to book in an individual training session.

Key Points:

• Review authors should work closely, from the start of the protocol, with an experienced medical/healthcare librarian or information specialist.

• Studies (not reports of studies) are included in Cochrane reviews but identifying reports of studies is currently the most convenient approach to identifying the majority of studies and obtaining information about them and their results.

• The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) and MEDLINE, together with Embase (if access to Embase is available to the review team), should be searched for all Cochrane reviews.

• Where available, the Specialized Register(s) of the relevant Cochrane Group(s) should be searched for all Cochrane reviews, either internally within the Cochrane Group or via CENTRAL.

• Trials registers should be searched for all Cochrane reviews and other sources such as regulatory agencies and clinical study reports (CSRs) are increasingly important for identifying study results.

• Searches should aim for high sensitivity, which may result in relatively low precision.

• Search strategies should avoid using too many different search concepts but a wide variety of search terms should be combined with OR within each included concept.

• Both free-text and subject headings (e.g. Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and Emtree) should be used.

• Published, highly sensitive, validated search filters to identify randomized trials should be considered, such as the Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategies for identifying randomized trials in MEDLINE. The Cochrane filters for Embase and CINAHL may also be considered. Randomized trial and human filters are not required in CENTRAL and should not be used.

Haddaway NR, Grainger MJ, Gray CT. Citationchaser: A tool for transparent and efficient forward and backward citation chasing in systematic searching. Res Synth Methods. 2022;13(4):533-545. doi:10.1002/jrsm.1563

Selection of databases will depend on your research question, as well as what is available to you. Your librarian can help you with this. Embase, Medline/PubMed and CENTRAL are often good places to start if you are undertaking a medical intervention-based review, though there may be more suitable/specialised databases for your topic. 

Be aware that there is overlap in coverage between databases, and so you will likely retrieve duplicate results.

Should my search strategy be the same for all databases? 

Yes. When translating the search across databases you must ensure that your free text terms are the same. However, subject headings and syntax will vary between databases.