Back to: Search and Screen Your Studies

Let’s review. At this point in your systematic review, you’ve assembled a team, taken a quick look at the existing literature, and developed a clear, specific set of research questions using PICO(D).

You are now ready to start identifying studies that might answer your questions.

This step includes two tasks:

1. Search– Create a strategy to comb through databases and other sources to find potential studies.

2. Screen– Eliminate studies that are clearly not relevant to your research question.

But before you dive head first into PubMed, you need to take one important step.