Authors: Carol Lefebvre, Eric Manheimer and Julie Glanville on behalf of the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group.
This chapter should be cited as: Lefebvre C, Manheimer E, Glanville J. Chapter 6: Searching for studies. In: Higgins JPT, Green S (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.0.0 (updated February 2008). The Cochrane Collaboration, 2008. Available from www.cochrane-handbook.org.
Acknowledgements: This chapter has been developed from sections of previous editions of the Handbook co-authored since 1995 by Kay Dickersin, Kristen Larson, Carol Lefebvre and Eric Manheimer. Many of the sources listed in this chapter have been brought to our attention by a variety of people over the years and we should like to acknowledge this. We should like to thank the information specialists who shared with us information and documentation about their search processes. We should also like to thank Cochrane Trials Search Co-ordinators, members of the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group (see Box 6.7.a), the Health Technology Assessment international Special Interest Group on Information Resources and the InterTASC Information Specialists’ Subgroup for comments on earlier drafts of this Chapter, Anne Eisinga for proof-reading the search strategies, and two peer reviewers, Steve McDonald and Ruth Mitchell, for their detailed and constructive comments.