How to Find Systematic Literature Reviews in Scout
Channel: University of Alabama Libraries
Date: 2020-03-05

Systematic literature reviews provide essential overviews, analysis, and comparison of related research. This video demonstrates how to filter and limit search results to find these types of articles using Scout, the Libraries' discovery & search tool at the University of Alabama. The search strategies shown here will work in the majority of scholarly research databases. 

The University of Alabama Libraries: libraries.ua.edu
UA Libraries' Guide to Lit Reviews: http://guides.lib.ua.edu/c.php?g=39963&p=253698

Video transcript: 
Hi, I’m Karleigh, a librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries. This video will walk you through how to find systematic reviews in Scout.

From the library’s homepage, select Scout, and then go to an Advanced Search. Type in the keywords related to your research topic. Then add “systematic review” in quotations as another keyword in your search string. 

The first few results are systematic reviews but then we start to see things like e-books and there may be a few articles that aren’t systematic reviews. A good next step is limiting your search results by source type, like academic journals or dissertations & theses. 

From here we can limit and focus our search results even further using the Filter By Subject limiter. Select show more and search for subjects like systematic review (medical research), systematic review, or even meta analysis. 

You can continue to use the Filter By Subject limiter to narrow our results even further.

To recap, using Systematic Review as a keyword and limiting by Systematic Review under the Subject limiter are two strategies for finding systematic reviews in Scout. 

Thanks for watching and I hope you found this helpful.  If you have any questions contact the library or visit ask.lib.ua.edu to ask a librarian.