It's important to use the same search terms in all databases! Otherwise you won't retrieve studies with the same scope.
Peer review articles reporting primary data are called original articles. Primary data can for example be in the form of interviews or questionnaires.
The starting point when developing a search strategy is a clear and concise research question, which hels you consider the main concepts of your review. The main concepts will also be the basis of your database searches and will guide you when choosing inclusion and exclusion criteria. One way to structure your review question is to use PICO, which can be used to study the effects of an intervention. For qualitative approaches other models can be used.
When structuring your search terms according to PICO (or a similar model) it's usually unnecessary to search every aspect of the review question. A review question may specify particular comparisons or outcomes, but only in the full text of the article, and they may not be very well described in the title or abstract of an article and are often not well covered with subject headings. Therefore using search terms for Control and Outcome (from PICO) might lead to not finding all relevant studies. Instead you can use them as inclusion criteria, but you often must read the whole article to define control and outcome.
Reporting the search strategies of a systematic review allows readers to evaluate the methods applied and to interpret the findings. With this transparency the results can be verified and the searches can be reproduced. The following information makes the searches reproducible:
You don't need to report all your searches, just the final ones, the ones leading to selection of studies.
|
Date |
Search terms |
Database |
Search results |
Number of selected studies |
|
220120 |
("crime prevention" OR "crime reduction OR "prevent crime") AND ("surveillance camera" AND CCTV OR "closed-circuit television") AND (secure OR safe OR safety) ... |
Criminal Justice Database |
78 |
10 |
|
2220120 |
"crime prevention" OR "crime reduction OR "prevent crime") AND ("surveillance camera" AND CCTV OR "closed-circuit television") AND (secur* OR safe OR percieved safety) ... |
ABI/inform Global |
64 |
7 |
|
220120 |
"crime prevention" OR "crime reduction OR "prevent crime") AND ("surveillance camera" AND CCTV OR "closed-circuit television") AND (secur* OR safe OR safety) ... |
Sociological abstracts |
20 |
2 |
Start by examining the titles and abstracts of the included studies, to remove studies which don't meet your eligibility criteria. Then go on to retrieve the full text of the potentially relevant studies. Next step is to determine if the seleced studies comply with your eligibility criteria.
When deciding if a study complies with your eligibility criteria you can ask the following questions:
Once you have decided on which studies to include you can start the data collection.
Criteria used for critically appraising studies are in large parts the same for qualitative and quantitative studies. The studies shoud all include a clearly defined research question and the sample, method, analysis and the results should all be clearly described. But since quantitative methods are used for numerical relationships in a way qualitative methods don't the questions you can use are a bit different.