After designing your search strategy, enter the keywords and subject headings you have identified into a database.

Searching is often a process of trial and error, and you will run many test searches before you have your final search strategy that will be reported in your review.

It's recommended to trial your search in the largest, most important database you will be searching. Modify the search based on the results you see, until you achieve your final search.

When looking at the results of trial searches, consider:

1. Is the search returning more results than you expected, or fewer?
2. Are the results relevant to your topic?
3. Are key "seed articles"/Gold Set included in your search results? If not, this suggests similar important papers might be missing too!

Once you have modified your search and you are confident it is locating all of the relevant studies, the search can be run in all other databases you have selected.

Every database works a little differently, but there are some similarities.

Keyword searches usually should be typed into the database's Advanced Search option, and it's advisable to search for keywords in the Title, Abstract and Keywords, if the database has an option to choose this.

Each database may use a different list/"thesaurus" of Subject Headings.

Once you have searched the thesaurus and identified which subject headings you will use in your search, to include subject headings in your search, select the Subject Heading field,

or use the database Help menu to find out if a certain symbol or code can be typed in to indicate that you are using a Subject Heading.

Because search strategies for systematic reviews can be complex, it's common to search for each concept in the database separately, showing how many papers match each concept. The database will number your past search lines. Then use the database's Search History feature to combine the search lines with AND and OR.

This webinar recording provides a demonstration of developing a search strategy in the Ovid Medline database for health-related reviews. It covers how to:

• Find seed references from which keywords and Mesh Subject Headings are harvested into a Search Planner Concept Table to then create a search strategy
• Proximity search operator ADJ
• Editing and saving search strategies online
• Testing that the search strategy captures seed references
• Reporting search strategy so it is transparent & reproducible
• Tips for increasing/decreasing search results

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Once you have conducted your initial searches, you will need to continue to monitor new studies being published. These may not be included in the systematic review once you have started the process of data analysis, but you should be aware of any developments.

A Search Alert notifies you of new articles that match a search you have saved. This can alert you to new articles in a given subject area, by a certain author, or containing specific keywords. 

You will need to register with a database to receive alerts.

Examples of databases that offer search alerts include:

All databases will have a similar functionality which allows you to set up an alert usually from the search results page.