Hello, Hope you are well.
I am doing a systematic literature review and on the topic I am researching, there is a limited research, during my initial serach, I found about 6-10 studies but when reading other systematic reviews the researchers tends to find >30 studies and they decide to include only about 10 in their study so I was wondering if it is ok to have found 10 studies in the initial search?
Honestly, it is possible if you're search was very narrow and/or with few articles on the topic. If I were you, I'd try to generalize my search a bit to catch articles that could possible get screened in the systematic review.
Yes I agree with @Sebawe Syaj about using more general terms and keywords for s
earch. In addition, use different search engines and search techniques to maximize search results, such as using boolean operators and wild cards etc.
Talha Riyaz
It depends on:
- how many and which database you are using (EMBASE, Cochrane, Scopus, Web Of Science..). Some database are more specialised in a field than some others.
- what keywords you used. Are they too specific? (in that case maybe generalised a bit) or if already generalised, then it means that you found a gap of knowledge.
- which operator you use; AND / OR, will give a total different number of articles as a result
- Maybe use PRISMA guidelines if you do a systematic review and don't use it yet
Dear Talha,
I suspect some field you may not have much evidence floating on the web, whereas other field you may become overload.
Just take care to allow your steps to be reproducible, your evidence for selection well displayed so that anyone can understand your selection of articles etc etc etc.
A truly reproducible and minimum biased SR is very hard to achieve (my opinion). And as long as we are coming up with improved methods (based on codes or not), then it is something very good in my view.
We talked about some aspects about reprodubilbity in one of the very important tasks in SR, which was presented at the Wikiconference of North America 2021 (https://vimeo.com/630039616)
Preprint WikiLetters Systematic Review: linguistic-method-codes supporting SRs
Well, feel free to test any code we have covered, and if you have any questions about using it, just let us know.
https://archive.org/details/wikiletters-systematic-review-c2
All the best,
F.P.A.
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