Wright 2014

Appraisal of: Wright JM, Cottrell DJ, Mir G. Searching for religion and mental health studies required health, social science, and grey literature databases. J Clin Epidemiol. 2014;67:800-810.

Reviewer(s): 

Carolyn Spry

Melissa Walter

Full Reference: 

Wright JM, Cottrell DJ, Mir G. Searching for religion and mental health studies required health, social science, and grey literature databases. J Clin Epidemiol. 2014;67:800-810.

Short description: 

The aim of this study was to determine the optimal databases to search for studies of faith- sensitive interventions for depression. 

Of 23 databases searched, nine were deemed “essential” for retrieving included references. References found in the bibliographies of key articles (citation tracking) and the personal libraries of individual researchers resulted in the identification of unique, relevant references not found in the database searches. In terms of grey literature, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database was the best performing grey literature database followed by Cochrane Central and Health Management Information Consortium databases. Neither OpenSIGLE nor the Conference Papers Index captured any included studies.

Searching social science and grey literature databases in addition to health databases is needed to capture all relevant information for this topic. Citation tracking and searching personal libraries must also accompany database searching.

Limitations stated by the author(s): 

This study could have been improved by including more widely used and readily available databases such as Web of Science databases, Scopus, SCIE, Google Scholar. This would make the priority lists more comprehensive and give a better indication of the best freely available resources.

References that were not counted, as they did not report anything new, could have resulted in a lower ranking of some databases in the priority lists. The priority lists ranked how strongly each database contributed to the references identified and selected at different stages of the synthesis process. p804

The quality of the Muslim search terms and the precision of the geographic search filter were validated by advisory group members but were not formally tested. A robust system of scoring databases would support helpful comparisons, based on their yield of relevant references and NNR (number needed to read), the relative value of the included references plus the search workload factors; interface familiarity (common database host), search functions, indexing, reference download functions, and cost of full text acquisition.

Limitations stated by the reviewer(s): 

Restricting the search to English language databases may have introduced bias into the study. A geographic search filter consisting of terms for all countries with a 95% Muslim population was combined with general religion terms to broaden the main search. Bangladesh did not meet this criterion but was included because Bangladeshi Muslims account for 16% of Great Britain’s Muslim community. Perhaps other countries that do not meet the criterion should have been included.

Since the project did not have the funds to acquire all potentially relevant dissertations and the reviewer did not have time to read them, a targeted selection was made of key dissertations that appeared to address unique issues. The authors do not provide a reasoning to their claim that the findings of this study may be generalizable for future searches of other religions.

Study Type: 

Single study

Related Chapters: 

Tags: 

• Grey literature