Establishing a comprehensive search strategy for Indigenous health literature reviews.
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ABSTRACT: Background
Appropriate search strategies are essential to ensure the integrity and reproducibility of systematic and scoping reviews, as researchers seek to capture as many relevant resources as possible. In the case of Indigenous health reviews, researchers are met with the special challenge of creating a search strategy that can encompass this large, diverse population group with no universally agreed upon identification criteria.Main body
With an aim to promote improved review methodologies that uphold standards of justice, autonomy, and equity for Indigenous peoples and other heterogeneous populations, we describe critical gaps and approaches to close them. We report organizational and transparency issues around how Indigenous populations are indexed in several major databases, and draw on examples of published reviews and protocols to demonstrate the challenges inherent to creating a comprehensive search strategy.Conclusions
The conduct and communication of results from health literature research on global Indigenous populations are compromised by challenges of methodology that are rooted in the complexities inherent to defining Indigenous peoples. These challenges must be urgently addressed to improve this important field of inquiry moving forward.
SUBMITTER: Harding L
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8056629 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundWhile writing a scoping review, we needed to update our search strategy. We wanted to capture articles generated by our additional search terms and articles published since our original search. Simultaneously, we strove to optimize project resources by not rescreening articles that had been captured in our original results.Case presentationIn response, we created Open Update Re-run Deduplicate (OUR2D2), a computer application that allows the user to compare search results from a variety of library databases. OUR2D2 supports extensible markup language (XML) files from EndNote and comma-separated values (CSV) files using article titles for comparisons. We conducted unit tests to ensure appropriate functionality as well as accurate data extraction and analysis. We tested OUR2D2 by comparing original and updated search results from PubMed, Embase, Clarivate Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, ProQuest Dissertation and Theses, and Lens and estimate that this application saved twenty-one hours of work during the screening process.ConclusionsOUR2D2 could be useful for individuals seeking to update literature review strategies across fields without rescreening articles from previous searches. Because the OUR2D2 source code is freely available with a permissive license, we recommend this application for researchers conducting literature reviews who need to update their search results over time, want a powerful and flexible analysis framework, and may not have access to paid subscription tools.
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