The systematic review process often takes a year or more to complete. If it has been over a year, your searches should be re-run and any new records should be screened and, if appropriate, incorporated into your review. There may not be many, or even any, but it is best practice to check. Many journals require that SR searches be run within a year or even 6 months of submission.
If you are using Covidence, you can upload the new results and it will automatically de-duplicate them against your previous results, leaving you with just the new ones (if any) to screen.
If you are using EndNote, you can isolate the new results using these steps:
For writing your search methodology, refer to the PRISMA-S extension. This extension will help you present your search process in a way that is complete and reproducible. The explanatory paper provides examples of how to report the elements of the search methodology as well as the items to report. As a result, following the PRISMA-S extension may make your search methods easier to write as well as more complete.
Most systematic reviews follow PRISMA for reporting their process. If you are using PRISMA:
| Title | Describe your manuscript and state whether it is a systematic review, meta-analysis, or both. |
| Abstract | Structure the abstract and include (as applicable): background, objectives, data sources, study eligibility criteria, participants, interventions, quality assessment and synthesis methods, results, limitations, conclusions, implications of key findings, and systematic review registration number. |
| Introduction | Describe the rationale for the review and provide a statement of questions being addressed. |
| Methods | Include details regarding the protocol, eligibility criteria, databases searched, full search strategy of at least one database (often reported in appendix), and the study selection process. Describe how data were extracted and analyzed. If a librarian is part of your research team, that person may be best suited to write this section. |
| Results | Report the numbers of articles screened at each stage using a PRISMA diagram. Include information about included study characteristics, risk of bias (quality assessment) within studies, and results across studies. |
| Discussion | Summarize main findings, including the strength of evidence and limitations of the review. Provide a general interpretation of the results and implications for future research. |
| Funding | Describe any sources of funding for the systematic review. |
| Appendix | Include entire search strategy for at least one database in the appendix (include search strategies for all databases searched for more transparency). |
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