Study screening

Before starting the formal screening process, the review team will perform a pilot testing on a selection of 50 title/abstracts in English and 50 ones in Chinese. During the pilot process, the first three authors will screen those same studies in two rounds, that is, title and abstract screening as well as full-text screening; discrepancies will be resolved through discussion. Consensus will be reached on all those pilot articles before the formal screening process begin.

We will import all search results into EndNote X9. First, we will use EndNote to identify and remove search results that have the same authors, titles, publication year. Furthermore, we will manually sort the search results alphabetically by author names and by titles to identify the same abstracts that were submitted to different conferences and therefore published by different journals; using the same strategies, we will also identify different publications from the same studies where interim analysis results were published first and later did the main publications. We will keep the more comprehensive and later publications from the same studies.

After deduplication, remaining search results will be uploaded to Covidence, an online platform that aids the process of systematic and scoping reviews. Study screening includes firstly title and abstract screening, and then full-text screening. Two reviewers will independently review titles and abstracts. When conflict occurs, a third reviewer will independently judge the study. If duringtitle and abstract screening it is impossible to determine whether that study contains relevant information, we willselect ‘Maybe’ to examine further in the full-text step. Publications that have been deemed as ‘relevant’ or ‘maybe’ proceed to the full-text screening where full-text documents for each publication will be scrutinised by tworeviewers independently. A third reviewer will serve as a referee when the decisions made by the initial two reviewers are inconsistent.

Studies are eligible if they report or discuss on health-related topics of non-refugee sub-Saharan African migrants living in Asia-Pacific region. We chose to focus on non-refugee migrants because they have been understudied and may experience drastically different postmigration health issues compared with refugee populations. Studies will be included if they contain information on sub-Saharan African origin country (or countries), AND Asian-Pacific country (or countries) of arrival AND migration AND health. To further rule out irrelevant search results, we will apply the following exclusion criteria in screening (table 2).

Exclusion criteria and examples for study screening