In order to cover your bases, you'll want to have (and document) a thorough search strategy that includes:
Electronic databases
Reference lists (of existing systematic reviews & studies chosen for inclusion)
hand-searching key journals
contacting authors, organizations, conferences
Best practice for systematic searching recommends searching at least 3 databases with one of those databases being interdisciplinary. For reviews in the social sciences, I'd recommend that, regardless of your topic, you include both of the below databases.
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Updated monthly. Indexes and abstracts over 1,700 sources, including international material selected from periodicals written in over 35 languages. Contains current chapter and book coverage with worldwide English-language material published from 1987 to the present, and adds over 60,000 references annually through monthly updates. Covers the professional and academic literature in psychology and related disciplines.
Has over 1.8 million individual records, some dating back to 1887.
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In addition to full-text journals, SocINDEX with Full Text contains informative abstracts for core coverage journals dating as far back as 1895. Includes indexing for books, monographs, conference papers and other non-periodical content sources.
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Updated weekly. The Web of Science Core Collection is a group of databases (Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1900-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present) that together cover more than 21,000 journals across all disciplines. The Emerging Sources Citation Index (2005-present) tracks thousands of additional journals that are being considered for inclusion in the main citation indexes. Other files track references from conference proceedings (1990-present) and citations to books (2005-present).
The Web of Science platform currently also provides temporary access to several databases that are not part of the Core Collection, including Biosis Citation Index, Data Citation Index, and Zoological Record.
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Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
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Updated monthly. The Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health (CINAHL) database provides authoritative coverage of the literature related to nursing and allied health disciplines. Includes indexing for more than 5,100 journals with coverage as far back as 1937 and full text coverage for more than 700 journals. In addition to journals, includes healthcare books, nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of professional practice, and educational software.
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Updated daily. Provides nearly 550 scholarly full text journals, including nearly 450 peer-reviewed journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Also featured are abstracts and indexing for nearly 850 journals. Full text information in this database dates as far back as 1975.
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Updated monthly. Provides bibliographic indexing from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and the preclinical sciences. Contains bibliographic citations (e.g., authors, title, and journal reference) and author abstracts from 4,500 biomedical journals published in the United States and 70 foreign countries.
Journal articles are indexed for MEDLINE using NLM's controlled vocabulary, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Citations are created by the National Library of Medicine, International MEDLARS partners, and cooperating professional organizations.
MEDLINE has worldwide coverage, but 88% of the citations in current MEDLINE are to English-language sources and 76% have English abstracts.
NLM provides free access to MEDLINE through PubMed.
Unlimited users.
Updated weekly. Provides access to over 36 million citations in MEDLINE, PreMEDLINE, and other related databases. Links to the full text articles are provided when available, subject to UT subscription status.
Set up LibKey Nomad to find access through the UT Libraries subscriptions and purchases.
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The collection includes full text for more than 1,700 journals, 550 books and monographs, education-related conference papers, citations for over 4 million articles including book reviews and over 100,000 controlled and cross-referenced names of educational tests. Coverage in Education Source spans all levels of education from early childhood to higher education and also includes educational specialties such as multilingual education, health education and testing.
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Updated monthly. Provides a digital library of education-related resources. Contains over 1.1 million citations covering research documents, journal articles, technical reports, program descriptions and evaluations, and curricular materials in the field of education.
Also includes more than 107,000 full text non-journal documents indexed by the ERIC database. Approximately one-half of the entries in the ERIC database are to ERIC documents. Microfiche copies of ERIC documents, including those prior to 1996, are in the Collections Deposit Library (CDL) Microforms Collection at MCFICHE 4913.
Using Medical Subject Headings in PubMed
Before starting on your review, it is helpful to read existing reviews and articles about reviews to help with the project management aspect of your review. Below are some I recommend.
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