Updating Health Evidence™

We update Health Evidence™ every month to ensure it includes up-to-date systematic reviews focusing on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of public health interventions.

Search

We search MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO monthly and BIOSIS, Sociological Abstracts and SPORTDiscus annually. We conduct manual searches in the Cochrane Library, ACCESSSS, Health Systems Evidence and The Evidence for Policy & Practice Information Centre’s COVID-19 'living' systematic map of research. All databases have been searched from 1995 to present. Please contact us at info@healthevidence.org if you are interested in reviewing our detailed search strategy.

Screen

Our searches return an average of 13,000 results each month. To help reduce the need to manually screen these results, we use artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the results by 80%. We then conduct title, abstract and full-text screening on the remaining results using five relevance criteria:

1. Is this a review article?

2. Is the review relevant to public health or health promotion practice?

3. Is the effectiveness of an intervention/program/service/policy the subject of the review?

4. Is evidence on outcomes included?

5. Is the search strategy described?

Appraise

Two independent raters assess each systematic review that meets all five of the above criteria using the Health Evidence™ Quality Assessment Tool. Conflicts are resolved through discussion; when needed, a third rater is consulted.

Finally, the systematic review is indexed with relevant keywords and added to the online repository.