College of Rehabilitation Sciences: PT 7500

*Information and links on this page came from NIH Systematic Review Library Guide ,

Clinical Trial Registries

Adjacency Operator Table

The table contains the adjacency operators for the platforms most commonly searched in the health sciences. # refers to the number you wish to use in the adjacency operator, i.e. ADJ# would be ADJ3 if you wanted 3 words or less between the two terms you are searching.

Operators

Four operators are available to combine terms

• OR gathers together lists of terms, use to build a concept - .e.g. New Zealand OR Australia 
• AND finds where terms occur together, used to focus a search - e.g. bicycle AND helmets
• NOT removes terms, use with caution - e.g. spiders NOT insects
• ADJx locates terms with are within X words of each other in either direction in a sentence or paragraph - e.g. cold AJD3 therapy

Truncation and Wildcards

Truncation or wildcards symbols find variations in spellings 

• Use * or $ at the end of a word, or part of a word to retrieve unlimited suffix variations - e.g. comput* for computer, computers, computing, etc. Add a number to restrict to a certain number of characters - e.g. comput$5
• Use a # inside or at the end of a word to replace exactly one character - e.g. wom#n
• Use ? inside or at the end of a word to replace zero or one character - e.g. robot? or flavo?r

The following databases are good sources for finding published systematic reviews:

• Cochrane Library
• PubMed
• Centre for Reviews and Dissemination
• Joanna Briggs Institute
• health-evidence.ca
• TRIP Database
• OT Seeker
• PEDro

Documenting your search strategies is an essential component of your systematic review and is required for your final manuscript.

Search strategies must provide enough detail to reproduce the search.

Aspects of your search to report include the following:

• Exact search strategies
• Databases searched
• Database interfaces used
• Date searches were run
• Database dates
• Order records were imported into reference managing software (RMS)
• Initial number of results retrieved from searches
• Number of results retrieved by databases after de-duping
• Total number of references
• Any keywords or numbers used to identify references in RMS (e.g. "Medline Search" for records retrieved through Medline search)
• Name of search, if saved in database platforms/accounts (e.g. MyNCBI)

Documenting your search strategies is an essential component of your systematic review and is required for your final manuscript.

Search strategies must provide enough detail to reproduce the search.

Aspects of your search to report include the following:

• Exact search strategies, including which terms in which search engines
• Every website searched, which pages were browsed on that website, and which search terms were used
• Date searches were conducted
• Resources identified from grey literature searching should be accurately tagged in the reference managing software being used
• Type of resource retrieved from search (e.g. report, journal article, presentation, book, etc.)
• Number of resources identified from each website/source
• Number of resources identified from grey literature searching