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Identify documents in electronic databases by searching for words that appear in the title, in the abstract or in the body of the text. Medline can also be searched by using the name of the author or the source journals.

Remember, records retrieved from electronic databases depend both on the structure of these databases and the way you query the database. Also, if you limit the studies to only those published in english language, you will leave out important studies in other languages. Finally, several documents are published in dissertation theses, or government documents which are not archived in these databases. These are oftent termed as fugitive literature.

Publication Bias refers to the greater likelihood of research with statistically significant results to be reported in comparison to those with null or nonsignificant results.

Acknowledge the problem in the study report

Try to retrieve all studies

Construct a Funnel Plot with effect size in the X axis and Sample Size in the Y axis. If the plot resembles a funnel with base down, shows that publication bias is minimum.