Hand-searching

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Contents

Introduction

See also Filters (ie. hedges), Meta-analysis and Systematic review searching

"...within The Cochrane Collaboration handsearching refers to the planned searching of a journal page by page (i.e. by hand), including editorials, letters, etc., to identify all reports of randomised controlled trials and controlled clinical trials. All the identified trials, regardless of the topic, are sent to the United States Cochrane Center, for inclusion in CENTRAL, and forwarding to the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) for re-tagging in MEDLINE. Trials that are within the scope of a Collaborative Review Group or Field go into their specialised register of trials. A handsearching manual is available through the US Cochrane Center. A journal handsearch registration form must be completed for each journal title and sent to the US Cochrane Center to avoid duplication of effort..."

Hand-searching is a manual method of searching and scanning print journals for research articles (aka. manual searching, reference harvesting or snowballing) and was first introduced in the 1990s as a requirement for systematic reviews. Hand-searching is a type of extended search technique and outlined by the Cochrane handbook. With the availability of so many online alternatives to hand-searching, combined hand- and electronic-search strategies may be necessary to adequately locate all relevant studies for the systematic review. (See Davis 2003, and above chart). Hand-searching is done by hand-searchers (often health librarians) and must be documented with other search strategies.

Recent research by health librarians suggests that hand-searching is still a requirement for the systematic review. Although keyword searching and reference harvesting reduce the need of doing a hand-search, it is thought that (due to incomplete and / or inaccurate indexing) hand-searching supplements structured, documented searches in the biomedical databases.

Use of hand-searching for systematic reviews

Hand-searching is the process of manually screening a defined set of peer-reviewed biomedical journals, conference proceedings and other publications on the web for relevant studies. Hand-searching is widely considered to be necessary for systematic reviews because it:

  • locates relevant articles poorly or inaccurately indexed or unindexed;
  • allows researchers to scan content quickly for relevant studies from the high-impact journals, and
  • ensures that relevant studies are not overlooked

The digital equivalent to hand-searching might best be described as power-browsing.

Why search by hand?

...hand searching journals has been identified as vitally important to conducting a high quality systematic review
as not all journals are indexed in electronic databases or may be missed by the search strategy used..." - (Armstrong et al, 2005)

Hand-searching increases the likelihood that no major relevant studies will be missed. Due to selective indexing in some databases and search tools and a tendency not to index supplements or special issues such as conference abstracts, handsearching is important for many if not most major research projects where comprehensive retrieval is required. If major journals in a specific field are not obvious to those handsearching, Journal Citation Reports is used to provide a list of the most influential journals with the highest impact factors.

Documentation of handsearching & powerbrowsing

Specific titles and date ranges searched for a systematic review should be included in the search strategies section. It should include journal titles, listed in alphabetical order, and the months and years that have been searched. In addition, any websites that have been consulted, whether it be for the purposes of browsing for information, searching for grey literature or locating experts in the field, should also be documented.

See also

References
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