Not all articles that meet our keywords in a search engine will answer our question. So, establishing an approach to select the right article before proceeding for comprehensive reading will save time and power. In this section, we will discuss a strategy to include or eliminate articles by checking the relevancy and quality of the article before conducting a comprehensive reading.

In Checking for relevance, probably you want to know if the article will answer your question or not. Figure 1 summarizes the approach.

• Read the title: 

  First, look for the title that is relevant to your research question; the population, and study design (if mentioned) as well. 

• Read the abstract: 

  The abstract helps us to determine whether we should read the entire article or not. Moreover, it will tell us an overview of the article. Start with reading the study aim or objective (usually found in the background). 

• Read the conclusion:

  The conclusion will sum up the findings and explain how and why the findings are important, relevant, or interesting.

Checking the quality of the study not only needs comprehensive reading but also deep reading with good experience to appraise. However, there are some clues that provide a most likely the article (not always) is good quality and we can rely on such as Impact factor, number of citations, and first author experience.

• Impact factor of the journal:

  The journal impact factor defined as the average number of citations per article the journal received during the previous two years (figure 2). It is the way of ranking the journal. How will that help? Well, the higher ranked journals the high they reject poor quality articles.

• Check the Number of citations: 

  Refers to the number of times that a paper has been cited by other papers. Usually, researchers only include the good quality in their own paper.

• First author experience:

  Check if the first author is an expert in the field; specialty, how many articles published on the same topic of interest.