Introduction: As part of its reconciliation journey, CMAJ seeks to understand the impact and extent of Indigenous-specific racist content published in the journal. To support a scoping review on anti-Indigenous racism, librarians developed an extensive search strategy to identify all articles about or related to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in Canada in the published contents of CMAJ from January 1911 to August 2024. In addition to Ovid MEDLINE (MEDLINE), PubMed Central (PMC) was selected for its full archive of CMAJ.

Description: Full-text search was necessary to retrieve contents not indexed in MEDLINE and earlier contents when journal and database indexing was limited. A comprehensive list of search terms was assembled using existing published search filters, and by consulting subject matter experts and terminology guides on Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Extensive testing searches led to our final full-text search strategy that includes approximately 1200 keywords and the development of an internal CMAJ search aid that documents lessons learned about search platforms, syntax and more.

Outcomes: A total of 7540 and 774 references were found in PMC and MEDLINE, respectively. After deduplication of the combined results, 7580 unique references were retrieved. Most references retrieved in MEDLINE were found in PMC.

Discussions: This is a unique search where a scoping review involves full-text search. At the time of writing, the CMAJ team is still screening search results. Given our sensitive search strategy, a large number of irrelevant references are anticipated. We’ll assess the effectiveness of our search strategy once the screening is complete.