DGM Research & Consulting

Documentation

Documentation is more than just a bibliography

Publishers and consumers of researcher expect a transparent, reproducible approach today. It is no longer enough to cite the works you consulted and compile them into a bibliography. It is just as important to document your approach to online research.

You should consider your approach before you even begin. Waiting until you’re on your way makes it much harder for you later, and it slows you down — sometimes you cannot go back and reconstruct your search strategies because they changed iteratively over the course of many searches. Don’t let this happen to you!

Documentation standards

Beginning in 2000, the Cochrane Organization recommended that specific search criteria be documented for every systematic review. The current edition of the Cochrane Handbook acknowledges one other standard as equivalent to their own1: The PRISMA-S search standard (see More on PRISMA, below). Cochrane and PRISMA-S both require these pieces of information to consider an online search fully documented:

  1. Name of each database searched
  2. Name of database platform if searching multiple databases simultaneously
  3. List of any registries searched
  4. List of any online or print resources browsed
  5. If/how citation searching was performed
  6. Names of individuals contacted directly for information
  7. Any other resources searched
  8. Full search strategies, copied-and-pasted directly from each database
  9. Any limits or restrictions that were applied
  10. Any filters or hedges that were applied
  11. Any previous searches that may have been modified and repurposed for this study
  12. Any updates applied to search strategies
  13. Dates all searches were run
  14. Peer review of search strategies by other search experts
  15. Total number of retrievals from each database
  16. Tools and methods used to deduplicate result sets.

Many publishers today require full documentation of the online search strategies so that (1) reviewers and others can confirm your sources, and (2) your literature search can be re-run at later dates to find new articles that have been published since your study. This makes the science transparent and reproducible.

DGM Research & Consulting produces a PRISMA-S compliant statement fully documenting our searches for you to include with your manuscript.

More on PRISMA

If you are not familiar with PRISMA, it is the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, the gold standard for documenting your research and structuring your manuscript. The PRISMA Extensions (PRISMA-S, PRISMA-P, etc.) describe a set of minimum items to be included in all types of manuscripts. There are currently 16 PRISMA extensions, with another 13 extensions under development (as of 11 July 2025). These standards make the science transparent, and they allow others to repeat, reproduce, and replicate your experiment.

This link will take you to the Protocols & Reporting Guidelines section on the Resources page of our website. PRISMA-P is discussed as an option for structuring your own research protocol. PRISMA is discussed as an option for structuring your manuscript.

Tenets of Transparent Research

For transparency, your research should be repeatable, reproducible, and replicable.2

Repeatable

You repeat an experiment when you conduct the same experiment multiple times using the same methods and the same data, and under the same conditions.

Replicable

Someone else follows your experimental setup using the same methods and under the same conditions, and they obtain the same results as you.

Reproducible

Someone else can reproduce your experiment when they conduct research using different methods and under different conditions. If other researchers can arrive at the same result through a different approach, your experiment is reproducible.

  1. Lefebvre C, Glanville J, Briscoe S, et al. Chapter 4: Searching for and selecting studies [last updated March 2025]. In: Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, et al, eds. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions version 6.5.1. Cochrane; 2025. ↩︎
  2. Plesser HE. Reproducibility vs. replicability: a brief history of a confused terminology. Front Neuroinform. 2017;11:76. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2017.00076 ↩︎