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Conference abstracts can reveal relevant studies before or without full publication, but their limited reporting makes them difficult to evaluate. Whether to include them depends on your review question, eligibility criteria, and intended use of the evidence.
Read Guide →A conference abstract with no identifiable full paper should not simply disappear from your review. Trace the study carefully, seek additional information where appropriate, and decide what the abstract can support based on your review criteria and the information actually available.
Read Guide →Government and institutional reports can contain valuable research evidence, including surveys, evaluations, administrative analyses, and technical studies. Their authority as documents, however, should not be confused with the methodological strength of the evidence they contain.
Read Guide →Preprints can provide timely access to research before journal peer review, particularly in rapidly developing fields. Whether you should include them depends on your review purpose, eligibility criteria, and how carefully you manage their provisional and versioned status.
Read Guide →When a preprint has subsequently become a peer-reviewed journal article, the journal version will usually be the appropriate source to cite. But the preprint should not automatically disappear when it contains unique information or differs meaningfully from the published paper.
Read Guide →When a preprint and its published paper report different results, do not automatically discard one version or assume peer review explains the change. Compare the study versions systematically to determine what changed, why it matters, and which result should inform your interpretation.
Read Guide →Studies can exist long before, or without ever becoming, journal articles. Learn how to trace unpublished and ongoing research through registries, conference records, repositories, study authors, sponsors, and other sources.
Read Guide →Clinical trial registries can reveal completed studies that never became journal articles and may sometimes provide results themselves. Learn when registry searching matters, what to look for, and how to interpret what you find.
Read Guide →Regulatory documents can contain studies, outcomes, adverse-event data, and methodological detail that journal articles omit. Learn why these sources matter and when they are worth searching.
Read Guide →Technical reports can provide methodological and implementation detail that a journal article compresses or omits. More detail is useful, but it does not automatically make the report more rigorous.
Read Guide →Some organizations conduct substantial research but rarely publish it in academic journals. Finding their work requires searching organizations, repositories, websites, references, and research networks rather than relying only on bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →Local and internationally indexed journals may differ in visibility, audience, and external vetting, but those differences should not become shortcuts for judging individual studies. Evaluate journal practices and study quality separately.
Read Guide →Local evidence may be distributed across theses, government reports, institutional repositories, technical documents, and other grey literature rather than conventional journals. Finding it requires searching the organizations and systems that produce the evidence, not only bibliographic databases.
Read Guide →A publisher paywall does not necessarily mean the paper is inaccessible or that you need to pay for it yourself. Several legitimate routes may provide the same paper through your library, an open-access copy, a repository, interlibrary loan, or the author.
Read Guide →An accepted manuscript has passed peer review but is not necessarily identical to the final published article. For many reading purposes it may contain the research you need, but post-acceptance changes, corrections, and citation details can sometimes make the version of record important.
Read Guide →An institutional repository is a digital service used by a university or other organization to collect, preserve, and provide access to scholarly outputs created by its community. It may contain an accessible manuscript of a paper even when the publisher's version is behind a paywall.
Read Guide →A paper uploaded to ResearchGate or Academia.edu is not automatically reliable or unreliable simply because of where you found it. Verify the paper's identity, publication status, manuscript version, provenance, and current scholarly record before relying on the uploaded file.
Read Guide →Finding a citation does not mean the full paper is available in the database where you found it. Verify the reference, search systematically across publisher, repository, and library routes, and do not treat an abstract or another author's description as a substitute for reading the original.
Read Guide →If you know a study only because another paper describes or cites it, you have not consulted the original study. Find and read the original whenever reasonably possible; if you cannot, make the secondary route visible rather than citing the original as though you read it yourself.
Read Guide →A language barrier does not automatically make an important research source unusable. Translation tools can help you determine relevance and sometimes understand substantial portions of a paper, but important methodological, numerical, or interpretive claims may require verification by a fluent reader or reliable human translation.
Read Guide →A working publisher page does not necessarily mean a downloadable PDF is available. Learn how to distinguish access restrictions from format and technical problems and how to find legitimate full text.
Read Guide →An author’s accepted manuscript has passed peer review but is not necessarily identical to the final published article. Learn when it can support your research and what you should verify before relying on it.
Read Guide →Different versions of the same paper can contain more than formatting changes. Learn how to identify each version, trace what changed, and decide which information is appropriate to use.
Read Guide →Relevance and methodological quality answer different questions in a literature review. A study may be highly relevant yet methodologically weak, and whether that weakness warrants exclusion depends on the review design and criteria established in advance.
Read Guide →A preprint and a later journal article may be separate reports of the same underlying study. Learn how to link versions, inspect meaningful changes, and avoid treating one study as two independent pieces of evidence.
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