IOM Standards for Systematic Reviews: Standard 3.1: Conduct a comprehensive systematic search for evidence
The goal of systematic review searches is to identify all relevant studies on a topic. Therefore, systematic review searches are typically quite extensive. It is necessary, however, to strike a balance between striving for comprehensiveness and maintaining relevance when developing a search strategy. Increasing the comprehensiveness (or sensitivity) of a search will reduce its precision and will retrieve more non-relevant articles.
The goal of a systematic review search is to maximize recall and precision while keeping results manageable. Recall is defined as the number of relevant reports identified divided by the total number of relevant reports in existence. Precision is defined as the number of relevant reports identified divided by the total number of reports identified.
Issues to consider when creating a systematic review search: