Grey Literature Searching for Health Sciences Systematic Reviews: A Prospective Study of Time Spent and Resources Utilized

Abstract

Objective-To identify estimates of time taken to search grey literature in support of health sciences systematic reviews and to identify searcher or systematic review characteristics that may impact resource selection or time spent searching.Methods-A survey was electronically distributed to searchers embarking on a new systematic review. Characteristics of the searcher and systematic review were collected along with time spent searching and what resources were searched. Time and resources were tabulated and resources were categorized as grey or non-grey. Data was analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis tests.Results-Out of 81 original respondents, 21% followed through with completion of the surveys in their entirety. The median time spent searching all resources was 471 minutes, and of those a median of 85 minutes were spent searching grey literature. The median number of resources used in a systematic review search was four and the median number of grey literature sources searched was two. The amount of time spent searching was influenced by whether the systematic review was grant funded. Additionally, the number of resources searched was impacted by institution type and whether systematic review training was received.Conclusions-This study characterized the amount of time for conducting systematic review searches including searching the grey literature, in addition to the number and types of resources used. This may aid searchers in planning their time, along with providing benchmark information

Prospective comparison of search strategies for systematic reviews: an objective approach yielded higher sensitivity than a conceptual one

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Systematic searching for environmental evidence using multiple tools and sources

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“…Deciding when to stop a search should be based on explicit criteria and it should be explained in the protocol or synthesis. Often, reaching the budget limit (in terms of project team time) is the key reason for stopping the search [41] but justification for stopping should rely primarily on the acceptability of the performance of the search for the project team. Searching only one database is not considered as adequate [26].…”

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