Hi Sarika,

The main reason for documenting a search strategy for a systematic review is to make the process reproducible. The search limits need to be clear from the onset and any changes in the limits would warrant a new search.

However, at this stage you could consider making the publication date, a report characteristic, part of your inclusion or exclusion criteria, but this would not be an ideal solution.

Regards,

Godfrey Mudhune

You can redo the search and filter the year of publication or you can follow Godfrey's suggestion, not a big deal. But if you registered your protocol in PROSPERO, you should write to them and there should be valid reason for the amendment.

I believe you should redo the search using this new parameter

Hi Suresh,

It is understandable that sometimes it is impossible to compress/review all the related literature of a research area of interest into just one manuscript.

Attempting to narrow down the search is very important in order to have a compact and reasonable conclusion.

The most important element of systematic review is justification of the selected articles.

The rationality for excluding" inception date to 2008" must be clearly justified in the manuscript.

"Are there any examples of studies who have done this i.e. excluded pre-2009 articles after conduction the search and going through abstracts and titles?"

There are systematic reviews done base on Scopus indexed journals in a particular study area, publications of a journal for just six months etc.

The most important thing is the justification of the exclusion criteria.

Take care

Dear correspondents!

I tend to agree with Godfrey Mudhune. A slightly extended approach might be this: Make a cut, (preferably) based on study year rather that publication. Argue that for such and such reasons the 'old' sources are less reliable or likely to reflect an outdated situation (-> bias). Make a full metanalysis of the 'recent' sources and a simplified metanalysis of the 'old' data, to examine whether the suspicion is likely to be (un)founded. Publish the full MA accompanied by the insight gained from the comparison. Promise your audience to keep the old datasets as fully as you store the recent datasets.

[If your problem is too much data, tread very carefully when you try to cut parts away.]

Good luck! Jørgen

If you are doing a systematic review with meta-analysis, I would advise you to use the recommendations provided in this article:

Article Research methods and reporting. preferred reporting items fo...

In addition to that, you can cut your research in a first stage (maybe the last 5 years), but after you select the papers you are interested in, you should analyse their references in order to grab older works that may add value to your study.

Everything is well clarified in the article I proposed