|
Abstract
|
It is with great interest that we read the letter to the editor from Peace-Tuskey. In this letter, the author raised methodological concerns about an article that we published in the March 2023 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, "A Systematic Review and Narrative Synthesis of the Evolution of Adolescent and Young Adult Cannabis Consumption Before and After Legalization", which we would like to address in this response.
The author first raised a fair criticism by noting that we neglected to present full search strategies, which "significantly limited the replicability of the findings for future updates". Although the full search result was provided in Figure 1 of the review, we take the opportunity to add as supplementary material to this response the full search strategies for each database, to fully comply with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines, and to improve the replicability of our results (see Supplementary Materials). We also provide the data extraction grid and the methodological quality appraisal guide.
The author then noted that our search was conducted in databases with overlapping content (MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Knowledge, and Scopus), which "substantially restrict[ed] the scope of articles for the search". While we agree that there is overlapping content between the databases used, we do not think that it limits the "comprehensiveness and methodological rigor of the systematic review". Rather, this choice was made to improve our chances of identifying pertinent articles that could have been indexed with slightly different terms in each database. Additionally, we think that these databases were the most relevant to use for the topic at hand, and a similar search strategy was used by Melchior et al. in a systematic review on the impacts of the liberalization of cannabis policy on the level of use in adolescents and young adults.
Language: en |