 Hi, my name is Alex, I'm a librarian at the University of Alabama, and today we're going to talk about another aspect of conducting a systematic review, the exploratory or introductory search. When starting a systematic review, there are some clear first steps. Among other things, you'll need to construct a research question, assemble a review team, create a systematic review protocol, search for published systematic reviews on your topic, and develop a search strategy. Developing a search strategy involves several steps. You'll need to choose relevant databases, develop a list of keywords and subject headings, and construct a plan for searching gray literature. During this process, we also recommend that you conduct what we're going to call an exploratory search. Sometimes, this is also referred to as a scoping search, although that can get confusing because there is also a scoping review, which is a specific type of literature review. For the exploratory search, you'll want to choose one to two of your most relevant databases. We've chosen PubMed for this video. You'll then want to construct a search using keywords and or subject headings. The first thing I want to establish with an exploratory search is the volume of results we're getting. Does a well-constructed search bring back enough results to support a systematic review? If not, you may need to look at broadening your research question. Conversely, too many results might prompt your team to narrow the question or the inclusion-exclusion criteria. It's also worthwhile to experiment with search strings at this point. You'll want to test various search strings in order to determine their efficacy. And you'll want to use the exploratory search in order to continue to iterate on and build out your list of keywords and subject headings. You may simply notice keywords popping up in the titles and abstracts of relevant articles. You'll also find author-supplied keywords on the record page of an article. Finally, the record page of the article is also an excellent place to find relevant subject headings. On PubMed, they're called Mesh Terms. And you can simply click on the list of terms of any relevant article. And that's all for this video. Hopefully you now have a better understanding of what an exploratory slash scoping search is, and why it's an important step in the systematic review process. And remember, if you have any questions, just ask a librarian.