LibGuides: Systematic Reviews: Searching

Intro

The following is a list of just some of the resources one could consider to search when conducting a systematic review of the literature. MCW Librarians are available to suggest databases, help you with your search strategy and to conduct searches for you!

Databases

Ovid MEDLINE This link opens in a new window MEDLINE is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's® (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains over 23 million references to journal articles in life sciences back to 1948 and earlier with a concentration on biomedicine. A distinctive feature of MEDLINE is that the records are indexed with NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH®).
PubMed LinkOut This link opens in a new window Search MEDLINE for biomedical literature. Includes links to MCW Libraries' journal subscriptions.
See our PubMed LibGuide for helpful information.

EMBASE International biomedical database with over 28 million records on drugs and diseases from peer-reviewed journals covering 1947-present. Searches in EMBASE are librarian mediated via an online vendor. Charges are passed along to the requestor. (Scopus includes EMBASE content from 1996 to the present. Scopus does not make use of the Embase thesaurus for synonym mapping and hierarchical searches. Search results may be less on Scopus if you don’t consider additional terms in your search strategy.)

BadgerLink This link opens in a new window Links to EBSCO databases of magazines, journals, newspapers, and other reference resources provided as a service of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Cochrane Library This link opens in a new window Collection of six databases that contain different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making, and a seventh database that provides information about Cochrane groups. (HTA).
Google Scholar This link opens in a new window Google Scholar (a subset of Google) is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines.
PsycINFO This link opens in a new window Contains citations to journal articles, book chapters, books, and dissertations in the field of psychology and the psychological aspects of related disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry, nursing, pharmacology, physiology, and social sciences. Journal coverage spans 1806-present.
Scopus This link opens in a new window Citation database of peer-reviewed literature and quality web sources with tools to track, analyze and visualize research. Covers the fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, and arts and humanities from over 5,000 international publishers.
Web of Science This link opens in a new window Subscription includes Science Citation Index Expanded (1998-present). Indexes 8,500 of the world's leading scientific and technical journals across 150 disciplines. Provides Cited Reference Searching and Times Cited data.

Grey Literature

What is Grey Literature?
Grey literature consists of studies produced by the government, industry, or other organizations in the form of reports, working papers, data sets, dissertations, fact sheets, policy documents or standards which do not appear in commercial journals. Grey literature is usually not indexed in standard databases and can be difficult to find. Grey literature should be consulted to reduce the risk of publication bias in the results of a systematic review. See our LibGuide on Grey Literature for more information on this topic!

Locating Grey Literature

ClinicalTrials.gov

Dissertations and Theses: Searches are librarian mediated at MCW Libraries via an online vendor with charges passed on to the requestor. (This database is also available for individual searching at the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University. For access to area academic libraries see information on the Cooperative Access Program.)
Grey Literature Report: A bimonthly publication of the New York Academy of Medicine providing information about grey literature in health services research and urban topics.
ProceedingsFirst: This database contains the tables of contents of papers presented at conferences worldwide. Searches in ProceedingsFirst are librarian mediated at MCW Libraries via an online vendor. Charges are passed on to the requestor. (This database is also available for individual searching at the Raynor Memorial Libraries at Marquette University. For access to area academic libraries see the information on the Cooperative Access Program.)
MedlinePlus Organization Directory: A collection of organizations providing health information. This directory is also arranged by topic.
OpenGrey: Search for grey literature from Europe.
Contact authors of key articles: Authors may provide access to unpublished work.
Hand Search Journals of Interest: Review the tables of contents in order to ensure no important studies were overlooked.
References from key articles: The references may contain pertinent articles that were missed during the original search.