New guideline for reporting literature searches in systematic reviews published

The PRISMA-S guideline for reporting literature searches in systematic reviews has been published in the Journal Systematic Reviews. The guideline includes a 16-item reporting checklist to help authors to report their information sources and methods, search strategies, search peer review, and how the records retrieved were managed. In addition to the checklist, PRISMA-S provides detailed explanations, examples and the rationale for how the literature search should be reported and why. It also explains how to deposit search data and method descriptions in online repositories. For researchers who are not librarians or not familiar with literature search methods, the guideline offers a glossary of key terms.

PRISMA-S was developed by a team of information specialists and systematic review methodologists with input from a range of experts during a Delphi survey and a consensus conference. The guideline has been developed to complement the PRISMA Statement and its extensions by providing a checklist for authors, editors, and peer reviewers to ensure that every component of a literature search is completely reported and fully reproducible.

Read the PRISMA-S reporting guideline