Table 1 A comprehensive search strategy to identify potentially relevant animal studies on TQF interventions

(1)

Formulate research question

Formulate a focused research question consisting of the following:

 1) Intervention/exposure

 2) Disease of interest/health problem

 3) Animal/animal species/population studied

 4) Outcome measures

What are the effects of 1) TQF herbs and compounds on 4) renal outcomes in 3) rats or mice for 2) diabetic kidney disease?

(2)

Identify appropriate databases and sources of studies

 • Identify both general biomedical and topic-specific databases

 • Select all relevant databases

 • Check other sources, such as reference lists

PubMed, EMBASE, China Biomedical Literature, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Chongqing VIP, and Wanfang

(3)

Transform research question into search strategy

 • Design and run a search strategy customized for each database

 • Start with a database that includes a thesaurus, e.g., PubMed or EMBASE

 • Involve an information specialist

 • Save citations (titles/abstract) in reference software

 • Document the applied search strategies

See Additional file 3 for details on the PubMed search strategy

(4)

Collect search results and remove duplicates

Combine saved citations of all databases into one file in the EndNote Library and remove citations that appear more than once

PubMed, n = 3942; EMBASE, n = 685; Chinese-language-based databases, n = 5173

Removing duplications (n = 5001)

(5)

Identify potentially relevant papers

Screen the title and abstract of the references and identify papers based on the potential relevance

Screen n = 4799