Table 4 Recommendations for enhancing complete identification of relevant studies for systematic reviews

1. This study provides empirical support for recommendations by recent systematic review guidelines, which state that two reviewers should independently identify studies.

2. Reviewers should search pubmed with free-text terms to identify recent studies, in addition to searching medline, due to the lag-time between article publication and entry to medline.

3. When using a study design as part of the search strategy, validated search filters are preferable