The search strategies were constructed for the development of a database of peer-reviewed studies on climate change mitigation and adaptation actions implemented in cities for human health and wellbeing. The development of the database followed a systematic process assisted by the use of machine learning methods for article classification to allow capturing a broad landscape of relevant literature across many disciplines and sectors. The search strategies are tailored to this purpose, and therefore, cover both explicit and implicit terms of relevance to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
There are two separate sets of search terms, one capturing climate change mitigation actions and one climate change adaptation actions. Each set is comprised of three blocks of search terms. For mitigation the blocks of terms are: (climate terms OR energy terms) AND (explicit mitigation and mitigation policy terms OR sector-specific mitigation terms) AND (health terms OR wellbeing terms). For adaptation the terms are: (climate terms) AND (explicit adaptation terms including resilience OR action-specific adaptation terms) AND (health terms OR wellbeing terms). Here we present the search strategies for Medline (accessed via Web of Science). These was also translated for the Web of Science Core Collections (consisting of SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSH, and ESCI) and Scopus. The bibliographic databases were searched in January/February 2021.
Further details on the development of the search strategy are available in the study protocol (see the associated papers).