Assistant Professor & Information Services and Liaison Librarian University of Illinois Chicago, Library of the Health Sciences Chicago, Illinois
Objectives: Conducting a thorough and inclusive literature search for a topic that includes the concept of disability is challenging as it is often unclear what terms, and granularity, would be appropriate and sufficient. To learn more about how other researchers have approached this issue, with the hope that potential best practices might emerge, this study identified and compared search terms for disability used in recently published systematic reviews.
Methods: Articles published in 2020 that contained both “systematic review” and disab* in their titles were identified using the database Scopus. Within these initial results, articles were retained if their scope 1) was not limited to a specific type of disability, and 2) focused on students (K-12 and college). This narrower population focus served to both target a more homogeneous collection of reviews and also eliminate articles that focused on pediatric or geriatric populations, where some disabilities might be either less likely to have been identified yet or be highly specific to age. The search strategies of retained articles were reviewed to identify what terms were used pertaining to disability, and these search terms were compared across articles to identify both commonalities and notable differences.
Results: From an initial 139 articles found in Scopus, only ten met the initial inclusion criteria, and did not need to be excluded for other reasons. Overall, the search approaches for these ten articles varied enormously, from using a single term for disability to using over 100 lines of search terms. Half of the studies included terms for specific conditions and/or broader disability categories, and some used terms that related to both students and disability, such as special education. Half of the studies used truncation/wildcards, three used subject headings, and three used proximity operators. Typically, authors did not provide details about how they came up with their search terms.
Conclusions: Within this ultimately small sample, there was little consistency to how researchers searched for disabilities, both in terms of terms used and search techniques utilized. Differences in search techniques made it difficult to directly compare the searches, however there seemed a notable divide between those that specified a range of disability types and specific conditions and those that instead used only basic variations of the umbrella term of disability. The use of proximity operators and wildcards also highlighted the potential importance of more advanced techniques for searching in this area.