Search across guide titles, topics, keywords, and content throughout the Researcher's Field Guide.
Showing 376–400 of 860 results
Theses, dissertations, reports, and working papers are scattered across repositories, specialist databases, organizational websites, and search engines. Learn where to search and how to find documents that conventional journal databases may miss.
Read Guide →Conference abstracts can reveal relevant studies before or without full publication, but their limited reporting makes them difficult to evaluate. Whether to include them depends on your review question, eligibility criteria, and intended use of the evidence.
Read Guide →A conference abstract with no identifiable full paper should not simply disappear from your review. Trace the study carefully, seek additional information where appropriate, and decide what the abstract can support based on your review criteria and the information actually available.
Read Guide →Government and institutional reports can contain valuable research evidence, including surveys, evaluations, administrative analyses, and technical studies. Their authority as documents, however, should not be confused with the methodological strength of the evidence they contain.
Read Guide →A report does not become unreliable simply because it was never peer reviewed, but you cannot assume that someone else has checked it for you. Evaluate its provenance, methods, data, transparency, potential bias, and the strength of the claims it actually supports.
Read Guide →Preprints can provide timely access to research before journal peer review, particularly in rapidly developing fields. Whether you should include them depends on your review purpose, eligibility criteria, and how carefully you manage their provisional and versioned status.
Read Guide →When a preprint has subsequently become a peer-reviewed journal article, the journal version will usually be the appropriate source to cite. But the preprint should not automatically disappear when it contains unique information or differs meaningfully from the published paper.
Read Guide →When a preprint and its published paper report different results, do not automatically discard one version or assume peer review explains the change. Compare the study versions systematically to determine what changed, why it matters, and which result should inform your interpretation.
Read Guide →Studies can exist long before, or without ever becoming, journal articles. Learn how to trace unpublished and ongoing research through registries, conference records, repositories, study authors, sponsors, and other sources.
Read Guide →Publication bias occurs when whether research becomes publicly available is influenced by its findings. The result can be a published literature that looks more positive, consistent, or convincing than the underlying body of research actually is.
Read Guide →The file drawer problem occurs when completed research, particularly studies with null, non-significant, or otherwise unremarkable findings, remains undisclosed. When those hidden studies differ systematically from published research, the visible literature can give a misleading impression of the evidence.
Read Guide →Searching for unpublished research can reduce the risk of missing important evidence, but it can also require substantial time for uncertain return. The right level of effort depends on your review question, the risk of selective publication, the likely location of missing studies, and whether finding them could realistically change your conclusions.
Read Guide →Clinical trial registries can reveal completed studies that never became journal articles and may sometimes provide results themselves. Learn when registry searching matters, what to look for, and how to interpret what you find.
Read Guide →Grant databases can reveal funded research before, or sometimes without, a journal publication. Learn when they are worth searching and how to follow funding records to usable evidence.
Read Guide →Government consultations can expose research, administrative data, expert evidence, and organizational knowledge that never reaches academic journals. Their usefulness depends on what the document contains and how critically you evaluate it.
Read Guide →Negative and null studies can be disproportionately difficult to find because some never reach journals. Finding them requires tracing studies independently of their results through registries, grants, reports, organizations, references, and researcher contact.
Read Guide →Contacting researchers can uncover unpublished studies, clarify study status, and provide missing information. It is most useful when targeted, systematic, and transparently documented.
Read Guide →Searching for unpublished evidence can reduce important blind spots, but the search cannot continue indefinitely. The appropriate effort depends on the review question, risk of missing evidence, likely value of additional searching, and available resources.
Read Guide →A literature search can appear comprehensive while still underrepresenting research from particular countries. Database coverage, language, indexing practices, publication venues, and search design all influence which research becomes visible.
Read Guide →Regional databases can be important when your question depends on evidence from a particular country or region. Whether you should search them depends on where relevant research is likely to be published and how well your existing databases cover it.
Read Guide →Searching primarily in English does not necessarily restrict you to English-language research. Translated metadata, multilingual search terms, regional databases, citation searching, and targeted discovery methods can help expose relevant non-English studies.
Read Guide →Translating search terms can improve retrieval when relevant literature is indexed primarily in another language, but word-for-word translation is rarely enough. The decision should depend on database coverage, searchable metadata, local terminology, and the importance of multilingual evidence to your question.
Read Guide →An English abstract can often help you discover and provisionally screen a study published in another language. Whether it is enough depends on the decision you are trying to make and how much information the abstract actually contains.
Read Guide →A missing English abstract should not automatically remove a potentially relevant study from consideration. Other metadata, original-language text, citation trails, journal records, and targeted translation can help you determine whether the study should proceed.
Read Guide →Language restrictions can change which studies enter a review and may therefore affect its estimates, precision, certainty, or conclusions. The effect is not predictable or equally important across topics.
Read Guide →