Which databases to search for a literature review

A literature review usually searches several bibliographic databases, because each one indexes a different part of the published research. This table lists the fourteen that SLReviewFlow imports, how you can get access, which file to export, and whether the file carries the reference list of each article. The name of each database links to its full export guide or to its notes further down this page.

Checked against SLReviewFlow's import templates on 26 Oct 2026.

Choose databases for the literature your question needs, not for the ones you already know. Multidisciplinary databases such as Scopus, Web of Science, OpenAlex and Lens.org cover most fields, but each has gaps, and subject databases index journals, conference papers and reports that the large ones miss. Bramer and colleagues found that no single database retrieved all the studies included in a set of systematic reviews, and that combining several was needed to find nearly all of them.

• Health and clinical: PubMed, Embase and Cochrane CENTRAL for trials, with CINAHL (through EBSCOhost) for nursing and allied health.
• Psychology, education and social science: APA PsycInfo and ERIC through EBSCOhost, and ProQuest for theses and social science collections.
• Engineering and computing: IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library for conference papers, which are central in these fields, plus ScienceDirect.
• Theses and grey literature: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar through Publish or Perish.

If your institution does not subscribe to Scopus or Web of Science, OpenAlex and Lens.org are free, export in full, and both supply cited references.

Four habits keep your searches reportable. PRISMA-S, the reporting guideline for literature searches, asks you to report each database, the platform it was searched on, the full query and the date, so record these as you go rather than reconstructing them later.

• One search, one import file. Export the results of each search separately, and upload each file under the search it came from.
• Record the date, the query and the number of results. Copy the query exactly as the database shows it, including any filters you applied. The result count lets you check that the export is complete.
• Export every field the database offers. Abstracts and subject terms help screening; affiliations, funding and references feed later analyses. A field left out cannot be added later without exporting again.
• Keep every part of a split export. Most databases limit how many records one file can hold. When you export in batches, upload every batch under the same search.

Every export carries the title, authors, year and source of each record. Beyond that, databases differ a great deal. The matrix shows which fields arrive in SLReviewFlow from each database's recommended export.

Abstracts matter most, because title and abstract screening depends on them; a database that only gives snippets, such as Google Scholar, leaves more decisions for the full-text stage. Keywords and controlled subject terms, such as MeSH in PubMed and Emtree in Embase, help you check that the search found what you meant. Affiliations, funding and citation counts support descriptive and bibliometric analyses of the included studies.

Cited references are the reference list of each record: the works it cites. They let you search backwards from your included studies, which is a recommended supplementary search method, and they make citation and co-citation analyses possible.

Only some sources supply them. Scopus, Web of Science and Lens.org include them in the export when you choose the right option; Dimensions includes them in its bibliometric mapping export only. For OpenAlex, SLReviewFlow fetches each record's references from OpenAlex after you import the file, which is why the export must include the Work ID column.

Citation searching, trial registers, organisation websites and hand searching are reported separately from databases in a PRISMA 2020 flow diagram. Collect those records in a reference manager such as Zotero or EndNote, export them as an RIS file, and add them in SLReviewFlow under Other methods, with the date and a description of how you found them.

1. Rethlefsen ML, Kirtley S, Waffenschmidt S, et al. PRISMA-S: an extension to the PRISMA statement for reporting literature searches in systematic reviews. Syst Rev. 2021;10:39. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-020-01542-z
2. Bramer WM, Rethlefsen ML, Kleijnen J, Franco OH. Optimal database combinations for literature searches in systematic reviews: a prospective exploratory study. Syst Rev. 2017;6:245. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-017-0644-y
3. Page MJ, McKenzie JE, Bossuyt PM, et al. The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ. 2021;372:n71. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n71