Literature Searches in the Conduct of Systematic Reviews and Evaluations

Performing a literature search is an important part of performing a systematic review or a meta-analysis of biomedical literature, which have now become the gold standards for determining what qualifies as ‘evidence-based’ medicine. Combining searches of English-language databases and the large Chinese-language databases can identify new, potentially important, sources of data that are not include in the traditional English-only reviews. Selection of a restricted subset of databases for conducting the literature search or using inappropriate methods to identify appropriate articles within each database can lead to biased results and incorrect conclusions. This article introduces common English and Chinese databases, describes the search engines available for conducting searches, discusses the basic methods and common pitfalls of conducting searches, and provides an example of a search to highlight these issues.