Scoping Review Guide

A tightly focused research question is key to your search. Map your review question to terms.  List all relevant keywords and relevant subject headings, using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

When performing the search for a scoping review:

• it is best practice to search using both subject headings and keyword searches.
• search one database at a time (begin with Medline - either Ovid or PubMed).
• search one concept at a time.
   

Remember: a scoping search is an iterative process! You will need to constantly evaluate, validate, and verify your search results.

Having a few pre-identified key studies can help with finding search terms and developing search strategies.

It is important to find all the relevant keywords for the topic to ensure the search is comprehensive by identifying

• different spellings, tenses and word variants of keywords
• synonyms
• related concepts

There are many  ways to locate these terms, including background reading, dictionaries, regular and database thesauri or subject headings and text mining tools. The process of searching will also help identify more terms.

Subject headings allow you to find all articles about a particular concept, regardless of the terminology that is used in the article. You should always use both subject headings and keywords in your search strategy.

Many medical databases have a subject thesaurus which you should use when searching for subject headings.