If you can't find any reviews...

My colleague Angela totally saved me today. I was doing this search on spinal/epidural anesthetics for C-sections, and all I could find was studies. Seriously, where were the reviews? It didn't seem possible that there were no reviews, and yet, I couldn't find any (in Medline).

My MeSH terms were: "Anesthesia, Spinal"[Mesh] OR "Anesthesia, Epidural"[Mesh]

Which seemed reasonable at the time, but there were no reviews.

Angela did the peer review on my search and was also surprised that there were no reviews. A few minutes later she came back with a Cochrane review exactly on topic. Whaaat?

So, it turns out that the Cochrane review was indexed with the broader term of the two MeSH that I used, which is "Anesthesia, Conduction"[Mesh]. I'd come across two other terms for this (regional and neuraxial) but not conduction, so I had assumed it was too broad.

I think this might be a bit like the rule of three situation that sometimes occurs. Anyway, I'm thinking that when there aren't many reviews for a topic which would seem to be a good one for reviews, a good strategy would be to check out some broader terms, since reviews tend to be broader in scope than studies.

I'll try it out a few times and report back whether it's a broadly applicable strategy or just applies in this instance.

Children

Apparently I don't have a blog posting for searching for info about children

This is useful when the limits ("Adolescent"[Mesh] OR "Child"[Mesh] OR "Infant"[Mesh])
 just aren't doing it for you. Which is kind of often, because of the whole "is 18 years an adolescent or an adult" thing, plus the whole reviews-don't-require-checktags thing.

If you're looking for everything you can find:

child[all fields] OR children[all fields] OR childhood[all fields] OR pediatr*[all fields] OR paediatr*[all fields] OR juvenile*[all fields] OR adolesc*[all fields] OR teen*[all fields] OR youth[all fields] OR boy[all fields] OR boys[all fields] OR girl[all fields] OR girls[all fields] OR infan*[all fields] OR newborn*[all fields] OR neonat*[all fields] OR toddler*[all fields] OR preschool*[all fields] OR pre-school*[all fields] OR school age*[all fields] OR elementary[all fields] OR high school*[all fields] OR secondary school*[all fields] OR grade school*[all fields] OR preteen*[all fields] OR pre-teen*[all fields] OR prepubescen*[all fields] OR pre-pubescen*[all fields] OR middle school*[all fields] OR schoolchild*[all fields]

If you're trying to narrow to just the pediatric-specific stuff:

child*[tiab] OR pediatr*[tiab] OR paediatr*[tiab] OR juvenile*[tiab] OR adolesc*[tiab] OR teen*[tiab] OR youth[tiab] OR boy[tiab] OR boys[tiab] OR girl*[tiab] OR infan*[tiab] OR newborn*[tiab] OR neonat*[tiab] OR toddler*[tiab] OR preschool*[tiab] OR pre-school*[tiab] OR school age*[tiab] OR elementary[tiab] OR high school*[tiab] OR secondary school*[tiab] OR grade school*[tiab] OR preteen*[tiab] OR pre-teen*[tiab] OR prepubescen*[tiab] OR pre-pubescen*[tiab] OR middle school*[tiab] OR schoolchild*[tiab]

For Ovid Medline:

(child* OR pediatr* OR paediatr* OR juvenile* OR adolesc* OR teen* OR youth OR boy OR boys OR girl* or infan* or newborn* or neonat* or toddler* or preschool*or pre-school* OR school age* OR elementary OR high school* OR secondary school* OR grade school* OR preteen* OR pre-teen* OR prepubescen* OR pre-pubescen* or middle school* or schoolchild*).ti,ab.