Handsearching is a critical part of the review to find materials not found through traditional searches. It is a manual process to examine and identify further relevant studies and includes:
Why is it important?
The Cochrane Training link below provides further information on handsearching:
Citation chaining is a method that allows you to search forward (snowballing) or backward (pearling) in time - going from one relevant article to many. If you have already found a few relevant articles, this method will help you to find many more articles on a similar topic.
Each database or information source operates in a different manner, and so it may not be apparent how to take advantage of the research you find. Some key areas of an item record to look for are headings or icons such as:
The quick reference guide below provides instructions on how to do this using the Scopus database: