DNP 866 Evidence-Based Practice

Documenting Your Search

For your DNP-866 Search Strategy Assignment, you'll need to keep track of your search as if you were conducting a systematic review. That means you will need to document how many articles you started with, how many articles you ended up with, and how you eliminated the others along the way.

Because your assignment is recreating the method of a systematic review, it can be helpful to understand what that process looks like

1. Create one search with all of your keywords, alternative terms, and subject headings that you will use to search all of your databases (w/appropriate variations for unique subject headings)
2. Search each database and download the complete results.
3. Merge your results (using a spreadsheet or a citation management application, like Zotero).
4. Delete the duplicates.
5. Examine every title and abstract for every article left in your merged list.
6. Eliminate the articles that do not meet your inclusion criteria. Keep articles if you aren't sure.
7. Find the full-text of every article that remains and strategically read each article.
8. Eliminate the articles that do not meet your inclusion criteria
9. Document the reasons for eliminating each article.
10. The remaining articles are all part of you literature review. 

Throughout that process, you will want to track your numbers at each step. Here are the elements you'll want to track.

1. The total search results from each database.
2. The number of duplicates across all of your database searches 
3. The number of articles you eliminated from looking at the titles and abstracts
4. The number of articles you eliminated after looking at the full-text
5. A tally of the exclusion criteria for all of the eliminated articles.
6. The final number remaining after removing all of the excluded articles.

Those numbers will all go into your PRISMA flow diagram (see below). 

PRISMA Flow Diagram

A PRISMA Diagram is a flow chart that shows the decision making path you took to eliminate search results and land on a final group of information sources to review. The content can vary based on the type of review and the types of sources you choose to include. Here is an example:

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