Search Methods

A bibliographic literature search for relevant articles was designed and conducted by a health librarian. The initial search was designed in Ovid Medline and peer reviewed by a second librarian, using the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) checklist (McGowan et al. 2016). Once finalized, the search was translated for use in additional databases and the search was run.  After gathering the results, the team opted to further refine the search, which resulted in some differences between the search methods outlined in the protocol for this review (Kelly et al. 2018) and the process that was eventually followed in the final version of the search. The protocol indicated that two additional databases - CENTRAL (Wiley) and MathSciNet – would be used for this review, but they were eventually excluded in order to reduce the volume of irrelevant results retrieved and, by extension, the number of results that had to be screened. Some search strings were modified for the same reason. In addition, the original intent was to limit results to English-, French- and Dutch-language (the languages our project team is fluent in) published between 2010 and 2017.  The final search incorporated the language limit, but also limited to human studies, published any time from 2010 onwards.  The final search for this review was conducted on April 20, 2020 in the following databases: Ovid MEDLINE(R) and Epub Ahead of Print, In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations and Daily <1946 to April 20, 2020>; Embase <1974 to 2020 Week 16>; and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts <1970 to April 2020>.  


Citations:
 
McGowan J et al. PRESS Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies: 2015 Guideline Statement. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 2016 Jul 1;75:40–6.

Kelly LE et al. Considerations for adaptive design in pediatric clinical trials: study protocol for a systematic review, mixed-methods study, and integrated knowledge translation plan. Trials 19, 572 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13063-018-2934-7