An instrument for evaluating searches for systematic reviews: The SRS-checklist

Introduction: The purpose of systematic reviews is to keep health care professionals up to date with the latest evidence in their field and guide clinical practice, and should therefore strive to identify all relevant evidence. Performing a systematic search of the literature is necessary to identify relevant studies and is the starting point for nearly all systematic reviews. The search strategy should be reproducible and visible to the readers in order for them to be able to judge the quality of the search and thereby the credibility of the results.

Aim: To create a checklist for evaluating the reproducibility and quality of search strategies in systematic reviews, and to validate the checklist. Other checklists deal with methodological quality and the search strategy, but none go into detail regarding the documentation of the search strategies. We consider the search strategy of such vital importance to the credibility of the results that an evaluation instrument needs to address all important elements concerning both reproducibility and quality to avoid bias. We call our evaluation instrument the Systematic Review Search checklist or the SRS-checklist for short.