Decolonising Literature Searching

Highly Sensitive Searching Strategies  (Or HSSS) are a way of searching academic databases that reduce the risk of missing key papers. This is very important as countries outside of UK/US and European academia may be considered to have a disadvantage in publishing in journals. Metadata and keywords may not be as extensive or missing and a good 'Highly Sensitive Search Strategy' may help to reduce this risk, but certainly will not eliminate it. Searching through the additional Global and Local scholarly journal websites and databases (below)  is strongly recommended,

Guidance on a good 'Highly Sensitive Search' can be found on the Systematic Review Libguide

About Search Filters

Even the best search can be improved by reviewing previous search strategies and filters. Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) group has published a list of LMIC filters for databases searching. (Unfortunately the EPOC Group is no longer active, but the latest filters can be downloaded here )

The ISSG Search Filters Resource includes a selection of papers that review search filter performance for Geographic Regions, and include Middle Eastern and LMIC countries.

Also the paper ‘The ScHARR LMIC filter: Adapting a low‐ and middle‐income countries geographic search filter to identify studies on preterm birth prevention and management’,  is a good paper that discusses geographical search filters.

If undertaking a Systematic Review or other evidence synthesis, the Unicef Methodological Briefs on Evidence Synthesis series is recommended reading.

When focusing a search on a specific country using the Library Databases, avoid reliance only on subject terms or searching only the country name, but add any major cities. In some cases major districts/counties or kingdoms may also be suitable. This will significantly increase the sensitivity of any search. 

You can search online for lists of major cities ranked by population. The World Population Review Website works for larger countries, but smaller nations may require further research.

Example "Qatar"

Low and Middle Income

For lists of countries regarded as "Developing Countries", refer to the World by Income and Region from the World Bank, which includes downloadable Excel spreadsheets.

Some of the resources in these guides are 'Pre-Print Databases'. Preprints are papers not yet peer-reviewed and published in a journal. Searching these papers can add additional diversity to a literature search. In most cases, these papers can be considered final drafts or working papers.

The Paper "The emergence of preprints: comparing publishing behaviour in the Global South and the Global North" discusses that with raising publication costs, the importance of preprints may increase, especially amongst authors from lower income countries.

Using Google Scholar is often discouraged as part of a good search strategy, after all, a University can have multiple high-quality 'Native Interfaces' (An interface where you can produce a high-quality search).  Evidence does show that these databases, even the large multidisciplinary products such as Scopus and Web of Science are not comprehensive when used for a worldwide and decolonised approch.

In the paper Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process open access journals using OJS (Open Journal Systems) are poorly represented in Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost,1649, 279, and 771 respectively, while Google Scholar indexes 22,679. 

The OJS publishing platform is extensively used by authors in the Global South, due to its low cost of entry, as detailed in Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – We ignore it at our peril. Therefore, a recommendation would be to add a Scholar search to any strategy that benefits from Decolonisation.

One of the common reasons for excluding Google Scholar is to minimise the retrieval of studies published in predatory journals and ensure the validity of the search. However the concept of a 'predatory journal' may in itself be biased and worthy of future research. A recommendation would be to consider additional steps such as critical appraisal, reviewing citations and references, or validity checking of the data rather than artificially limiting your search.  (See How should we handle predatory journals in evidence synthesis? A descriptive survey-based cross-sectional study of evidence synthesis experts)

Lens.org Scholar Search serves over 200 million scholarly records, compiled from Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and Crossref, enhanced with OpenAlex and UnPaywall open-access information. It therefore both surfaces in searches and allows access to large numbers of open-access journals, and includes a large representation of the academic output of the Global South.

You can search using Keywords, Titles, and Abstracts similar to a Scopuse search. You can also explore references in bulk as .RIS files, useful for Systematic Reviews.

To help with surfacing Global South research, you can exclude certain regional groupings such as G7 and BRICS countries, or choose to only search those countries, along with the more common country-level filters.

If you are considering a Google Scholar search, but find it overwhelming or inaccurate, Lens.org is a recommended and increasingly popular alternative. 

Trip is a worldwide clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care with a strong focus on highlighting evidence-based resources. Trip searches PubMed, National and International guidelines, systematic reviews, clinical trials databases, blogs, leaflets, primary research and much more. Filters can be used to focus on LMIC policies and research. Access at TRIP

Global Index Medicus (GIM) Providing access to over 1.9 million biomedical and public health literature documents from low-middle income countries, the GIM aims to increase usability and visability of vital rescources. The GIM is run by the World Health Organisation, the United Nations' special agency for health.