Ready search strategies

In medical research, literature review is one of the most important steps, yet, might require extensive efforts. A lot of effort spent to find the optimal way to conduct the literature review for medical studies. The index that reflect the efficiency of literature review, meaning that articles you would read are highly relevant is called number needed to read (NNR), which is an index of how many papers in a journal have to be read to find one of adequate clinical quality and relevance

Currently available methods for filtering searched articles to find the articles of most interest to your project can be difficult, and currently available methods are not accurate. For example, just clicking on "Review" filter button in PubMed will not yield only review articles, and will not even yield all reviews you want. You will need to use a pre-tested search strategy that can do that for you. Below you will find ready to use search strategies that you only need to use for your project of interest. The most important being systematic review search strategy, where you need to use it to validate any research idea you might have prior to proceeding with it.

Systematic review search

Here is a link for an accurate, pre-built search filter for systematic review, where you can just input your disease of interest to search for reviews in it. You just need to replace the word "Multiple Sclerosis" from the search field by the disease of your interest (e.g., Alzheimer).

Guidelines search

Clinical guidelines are expanding rapidly, with each disease has now tens and hundreds of guidelines. Here is a link for an accurate, pre-built search filter for clinical guideline, where you can just input your disease of interest to search for reviews in it. You just need to replace the word "Hypertension" from the search field by the disease of your interest (e.g., Alzheimer).

You can also input your keyword of interest to search for clinical guidelines in PubMed in the inputted keyword:

Randomized Controlled Trials

Majority of systematic reviews aim to include "Randomized Controlled trials". Here is a link for an accurate, pre-built search filter for clinical trials, where you can just input your disease of interest to search for reviews in it. You just need to replace the word "Hypertension" from the search field by the disease of your interest (e.g., Alzheimer).

Quality of life (QoL) search

Studies on quality of life can be difficult to retrieve, considering the variety of keywords that can be used for their search. Here is a link for an accurate, pre-built search filter for quality of life, where you can just input your disease of interest to search for reviews in it. You just need to replace the word "Hypertension" from the search field by the disease of your interest (e.g., Alzheimer).

Other

Lower & Middle income countries search: Search PubMed for studies on lower and middle income countries.