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.
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