Subject Guides
Systematic Review
A step by step guide
Document the Search Process
The PRISMA Flow Diagram provides transparency and allows for reproducibility of the systematic review.
The PRISMA flow diagram visually summarizes the screening process. It initially records the number of articles found in each resource and then makes the selection process transparent by reporting on decisions made at various stages of the systematic review. The number of articles is recorded at each step of the screening process. When you're excluding articles at the full-text stage, it is important to include the reasons for exclusion.
- PRISMA Flow Diagrams
The flow diagram depicts the flow of information through the different phases of a systematic review. It maps out the number of records identified, included and excluded, and the reasons for exclusions. Different templates are available depending on the type of review (new or updated) and sources used to identify studies.
- PRISMA Flow Diagram Tool
This tool allows you to produce a flow diagram for your own review that conforms to the PRISMA2020 Statement.
- Common Questions on Tracking Records and the Flow Diagram
In this article, we review some of the common questions about using the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram and tracking records through the systematic review process.
What to Document During the Search Process
Information Sources and Methods
- Database name
- Date of search and searcher's name
- Study registries searches
- Grey literature sources searched
- Any other method used to find additional information, such as searching specific journals or citation chasing from specific articles
Search Strategies
- Full search strings
- Search limiters used (such as publication date range or language)
- Updates to the search (such as redoing the search at a later date or using search alerts
- Number of results retrieved from each search
Managing Records
- How search results were organized
- What reference managers or other tools were used
- How results were de-duplicated
Citation Managers
Citation managers are tools that can help you stay organized during the searching stage of a systematic review.
- Keep track of search results
- De-deduplicate your search results
- Allow for group projects
- Provide notification of retracted articles
- Cite and Write capabilities
- Bibliographic formatting
Citation Management Subject Guide: a library guide which provides details regarding the various types of citation managers and other resources.
Additional Tools
- Covidence is a web-based screening and data extraction tool
- Covidence Knowledge Base tutorials
- Covidence Academy
- Introductory demonstration video
- An AI powered tool for systematic reviews
Citation Chaser can be used to easily identify articles that are citing or are being cited by specific articles you have identified as being relevant to your research topic.
The PubMed PubReMiner can be used to identify the most used subject headings for your exemplar articles, to help you identify relevant MeSH terms for your search strategy.
A MeSH analysis grid can help identify the problems in your search strategy by presenting the ways articles are indexed in the MEDLINE database in an easy-to-scan tabular format. Librarians can then easily scan the grid and identify appropriate MesH terms, term variants, indexing consistency, and the reasons why some articles are retrieved and others are not. This inevitably leads to fresh iterations of the search strategy to include missing important terms.
This simple tool from the NLM will automatically identify potential MeSH terms for a given text, such as a title, abstract, or research question.
Medsyntax is a free, open-source tool for visualizing and editing literature searches. It transforms search terms into HTML elements to visualize the search strategy effectively, provides an inline scope-driven editor and offers real-time error detection.
Polyglot is a tool that will automatically translate your search from PubMed to other major databases such as Scopus and CINAHL. Note that Polyglot can only translate search syntax, so you will still need to manually translate your controlled vocabulary terms.
The Systematic Review Accelerator is a collection of tools to help automate and streamline the SR process.
The Systematic Review Toolbox is an online catalogue of tools that support various tasks within the systematic review and wider evidence synthesis process. You can use the toolbox to search for help with a specific task, or browse tools by what stage of the systematic review you are working on.
