Steps in a Systematic/Scoping Review
More information is available on each of these steps in other sections of this guide.
- Develop a research question and select a type of review.
- Consult with a librarian for help with steps 3-17 (and set you up for success for the remainder).
- Search databases to see if a review has already been published on your topic.
- Search protocol repositories to see if a review on your topic is planned.
- Select databases and decide on other sources (hand searching, grey literature, etc.)
- Formulate an initial search for one of your selected databases (choose one of the larger databases, e.g. PubMed, so that you can get a good sense of how much literature you're dealing with).
- Review results from initial search, scanning titles, abstracts, and subject headings to identify additional terms.
- Identify that database's subject headings relevant to your search.
- Run the search again. Continue to add relevant terms and adjust the scope of your question (which may require eliminating terms) until results are predominantly relevant to your question.
- When you think your search is nearly final, gather 2-3 of your most relevant articles (related reviews are especially helpful) and test their reference lists against your search results. If your search contains a large majority of the relevant articles from those reference lists, your have your final search (remember no search is ever perfect, and you will nearly always add articles you find via reference lists, recommendations, etc. that did not appear in your search results).
- Translate your search to your other databases. For the most part, you want your keywords to stay the same across databases, but you will most likely need to adjust your subject headings (and certainly the syntax labeling those subject headings), because those can vary from database to database. Beware of tools like Polyglot that claim to be able to translate your searches for you. They do not actually verify the subject headings in the other databases but simply change the labeling.
- If you don't already have a librarian involved, ask a librarian to peer review your search. If a librarian is unavailable, try the PRESS checklist.
- Develop inclusion and exclusion criteria in preparation for reviewing articles. Try to make these as specific as you can, including operational definitions, especially if you have multiple people who will be reviewing articles with you.
- Develop a plan for data extraction.
- Write a protocol and register it.
- Run the final searches.
- Export the results from each source and upload them to whatever tool you will be using (see information about Covidence).
- Begin title/abstract screening. Two blind reviewers for each item is best practice.
- Begin full-text review of the articles still remaining. Again, two reviewers for each item is best practice.
- Conduct citation mining for the articles that make it through full-text review.
- Repeat the title/abstract screening and full-text reviews for the articles identified through citation mining.
- Check all articles that made it through the full-text review for retractions, and remove any articles that have been retracted.
- Conduct a critical appraisal of included articles (aka Risk of Bias Assessment or Quality Assessment). This is a required step for systematic reviews but not necessarily for scoping reviews.
- Begin data extraction.
- Synthesize and interpret your data.
- Prepare your manuscript (for information on writing each section of your manuscript, see our guide to Writing up Your Own Research).
