Search strategies designed to retrieve all references on coronavirus (COVID-19) and stroke healthcare

These search strategies were designed and constructed between May and July 2020. They are designed to retrieve all potential references in stroke healthcare and medicine (including transient ischaemic attack, cerebral small vessel disease, and subarachnoid haemorrhage) and coronavirus (COVID-19) on in the MEDLINE database on the Ovid platform, CENTRAL in The Cochrane Library, PubMed, US National Institutes of Health Ongoing Trials Register ClinicalTrials.gov (www.clinicaltrials.gov), and Google Scholar using the 2dSearch interface. The MEDLINE Ovid search strategy was written as a protocol and all additional searches were based on it. This high sensitivity search strategy contains 21 separate search lines and incorporates a combination of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from the National Library of Medicine, uncontrolled vocabulary/keywords in the Text Word (.tw) field, and Boolean operators to maximise sensitivity and recall. This search is divided into two components: 1. terms relevant to stroke healthcare and medicine; and 2. terms relevant to Coronavirus (COVID-19) which were based on the Ovid expert search for COVID-19 (Ovid MEDLINE(R) All 1946 to present) which can be viewed here: https://tools.ovid.com/coronavirus/Covid-19%20search%20notes.pdf.