Searching Comprehensively

Exploratory Searching

Advanced reviews require a robust and reproducible search strategy. This necessitates an amount of exploratory searching to help develop the search strategy you will report and use for your review. There are a number of things that you will accomplish through exploratory searching.

1. Determining if there is enough literature on your topic for a review
2. Identifying important terms, dates, policies, etc. related to your topic that you will want to keep in mind
3. Identifying key journals and authors publishing on your topic
4. Identifying key databases for electronic searches
5. Focusing your research question into something that is specific and answerable
6. Developing eligibility criteria by getting an idea of what you will and won't want to include
7. Testing your search strategy

Developing a strong search strategy is an essential part of the Scoping Review methodology. Searching systematically means that you have one search string that you use in your identified databases that will capture the greatest amount of relevant sources possible with the least amount of bias. If you're not careful, search strategies can introduce bias into the process. That is why including a librarian in the process is a best practice for Scoping Reviews.

Tips

As part of your exploratory searching, include a search for existing scoping or even systematic reviews related to your topic. This helps in a number of ways:

• tells you if your planned scoping review has already been done before, in which case you can either amend your research question or find a way to materially improve on or update the existing scoping review
• shows you where your review fits into the scholarly conversation and enables you to acknowledge the existence of related reviews in your introduction
• gives you a means to mine relevant sources from related reviews
• provides examples for how to conduct your own review (note what questions and criteria are included in these reviews, pay attention to search terms and databases used to search for studies)