Literature searching methods or guidance and their application to public health topics: A narrative review

Information specialists conducting searches for systematic reviews need to consider key questions around which and how many sources to search. This is particularly important for public health topics where evidence may be found in diverse sources.

The objective of this review is to give an overview of recent studies on information retrieval guidance and methods that could be applied to public health evidence and used to guide future searches.

A literature search was performed in core databases and supplemented by browsing health information journals and citation searching. Results were sifted and reviewed.

Seventy-two papers were found and grouped into themes covering sources and search techniques. Public health topics were poorly covered in this literature.

Many researchers follow the recommendations to search multiple databases. The review topic influences decisions about sources. Additional sources covering grey literature eliminate bias but are time-consuming and difficult to search systematically. Public health searching is complex, often requiring searches in multidisciplinary sources and using additional methods.

Search planning is advisable to enable decisions about which and how many sources to search. This could improve with more work on modelling search scenarios, particularly in public health topics, to examine where publications were found and guide future research.