Objectives: The Cochrane Collaboration recommends the inclusion of grey literature sources when conducting comprehensive systematic reviews. The objective of this bibliometric study is to learn if authors publishing systematic reviews in core nursing journals are including grey literature in their reviews.
Methods: We are conducting a search for systematic reviews published between 2017-2019 in journals indexed in PubMed's core nursing journal subset that state they included grey literature sources in their literature review. Articles found in this search that are indexed as systematic reviews or include the phrase systematic review in its title will be included. These articles will then be screened and reviewed using Covidence software. Both authors of this research study will screen and review the articles of this study to ensure inter-rater reliability. We will have an independent reviewer to monitor disagreements in study selection for the data analysis phase of the study. We will conduct a subset study to determine if there are any patterns between those studies that do report including grey literature and those that do not.
Results: We are still in the data collection phase of this study. Results will provide insight into the number and type of systematic review study that include grey literature sources published in core nursing journals indexed in PubMed. Variables that will be considered in the data analysis phase include: number of studies that include grey literature and those that do not. Other potential patterns related to journal publication selection, author instructions, number of authors, author affiliations, or author specialties will also be reported.
Conclusions: Conclusion are not available at this time. We will report conclusions at the conference, if selected to present.
