Abstract

Literature reviews – including systematic reviews – that underpin professional practice guidance and research funding bids now rely on searching electronic databases so as to ensure comprehensive coverage of relevant journals. Competent data extraction from journals onto databases is essential for efficient information retrieval and thus in ensuring that practice and research build on best evidence. The best investment to achieve a profession that bases its huge demand for knowledge on the best available evidence (and thus provides the most effective service to clients) would be a large, high quality database and a professional consensus on terminology for keywords used by indexers.