Thorough documentation and clear reporting are essential when conducting a comprehensive literature search for a health technology assessment (HTA) or systematic review. The ultimate goal of this process is transparency and reproducibility with the added benefit of increasing the reader's confidence in the research. Thorough documentation of the search also allows for critical appraisal of the methodology used and facilitates future updating of a review (1,2).

It has been found that large numbers of systematic review searches are inadequately documented and there is little consensus on best practices for reporting standards (3).

As part of the SuRe Info Project, we conducted a review of all current reporting standards relevant to HTAs and systematic reviews in addition to looking at the published literature on this topic in order to synthesize the evidence in this area and create a standard set of agreed upon recommendations.

We conducted a comprehensive search of Medline, Embase, and LISA (Library & Info Studies Abstracts) databases. We also examined the Equator Network (http://www.equator-network.org/) website. Reference lists of included studies and reporting guidelines were also consulted. Eleven reporting guidelines and eight studies were included in the review by two independent reviewers. Anything published before 2006, that was not a research article (other than the guidelines), and/or that did not provide new recommendations (that is, a review of another set of recommendations) was excluded.

After collecting data on the suggested reporting elements described in the literature, we pooled our results to create an overarching list of the most commonly recommended elements to describe and the most commonly recommended methods to use when documenting a comprehensive search. Not only did these elements pertain to documenting the search strategy for the final report, but they also pertained to the protocol and the abstract of a review.

It is hoped that this overview of the literature and compilation of the evidence will clarify some of the confusion that seems to exist when documenting and reporting searches and perhaps it will even help to reduce the existence of poorly described strategies in the research literature.