10.3.7.1 Search strategy

This section documents how the reviewers searched for relevant sources of information for inclusion in the scoping review. The search strategy must be comprehensively reported and the detailed search strategy for all of the major bibliographic citation databases and other sources that have been searched should be appended to the review. The individual search strategies for every database searched should be presented in sequence and in a consistent format in an Appendix. Clear documentation of the search strategy is a vital component of the scientific validity of any scoping review with justification of the dates of the search included in the protocol. A scoping review should ideally consider sources of evidence (primary studies, textual papers and reviews) both published and unpublished (gray literature). The time frame (start and end dates) chosen for the search should be clearly justified and any language restrictions specified (e.g. “only sources of evidence published in English were considered for inclusion”). Any hand searching of particular relevant journals should be detailed with the journal names and years examined. Author contact, for example, to request access to known but unavailable sources of evidence should also be included along with the outcomes of that contact.