To make sure we were conducting the most comprehensive and thorough review possible, Charlotte and I spent a long time making sure that we were being comprehensive in the terms we were including in our search, and that the additional subject headings and thesaurus terms we were including were also sufficient in capturing the papers we expected based on our initial scoping search. After consulting frequently with our systematic reviews librarian at Lancaster University, we were finally happy with the terms we had and ran the searches across the five databases we decided to include (Scopus, MEDLine, PsycInfo, ERIC, and Embase). After collating the results from all of the databases, we ended up with a whopping 21,888 results, and even after importing these into EndNote and following steps to remove duplicate papers, we were still left with 10,483 papers to upload onto Rayyan and manually screen.

The process of initially screening the titles of over ten thousand papers was, as you can imagine, very long and arduous, especially since we were double coding all screening and so both Charlotte and myself had to work through all ten thousand individually. Along the way we had frequent meetings to ensure that our decisions on which papers to include and which to exclude were aligned, and throughout we consistently had an agreement rate of over 96% which was great. Once the initial title screening was finished, we moved on to the next stage of the PRISMA guidelines for conducting systematic reviews, and screened the abstracts of the 786 papers we had included based on their titles. Abstract screening complete, we had 281 full papers left included for whole paper screening, where we will make decisions on which to include in our final review. A number of exclusions have been made based on the full paper screening already, from papers which include the wrong predictor or outcome variables, to papers which analyse the data in a way which means we cannot extract the specific data of interest. From this we will shortly be able to extract data from all of the relevant papers, and subsequently conduct analysis to see the impact that prenatal stress has on cognitive development and academic achievement.

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