Page 33 - MJHP MALAYSIAN JOURNAL OF HEALTH PROMOTION Volume 2, 2020

MALAYSIAN JOURNAL OF HEALTH PROMOTION Volume 2, 2020

2. METHODS
A systematic search was conducted for English language journal articles
published from 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2020 from the following
st
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databases: Web of Science, MEDLINE, PubMed and Science Direct. The
topic considered for the selection of articles was the one related to the global
pandemic caused by COVID-19 and how SDH plays role in affecting reported
cases. The keywords were selected from literatures and references mainly
from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Three groups of keywords were combined for the search: social
determinant of health OR ethni* OR rac* OR minorit* AND coronavirus
disease OR COVID-19 AND health promotion. A forward and backward
search was conducted to identify additional articles. Reference lists and cited
articles of included studies were cross-searched for other potential eligible
studies using the same inclusion criteria.

2.1 Inclusion of Studies
After removing duplicate articles, two reviewers (SAS and KAK)
independently screened the remaining articles by reading the abstracts
and if necessary full text (when titles and abstracts provided inadequate
information for determining whether studies should be included or
excluded). In order to apply these criteria, a first preliminary reading
of the title and summary of each article was carried out, which made
it possible to rule out papers that did not meet the above-mentioned
criteria. The articles were selected for review after thorough screening
and exclusion for ineligible articles. Articles were excluded if the article
was not related to SDH, COVID-19 and not focusing on minorities or
ethnicity. To extract data from the articles, the following coding was
established; (1) author/authors, (2) year of publication, (3) title of the
article (4) journal name (5) country of publication and (6) key findings.

3. RESULTS
The original search identifies the total of 27 articles. A large variety in
the article characteristics, objectives of the study and outcome parameter
was reported. After removing duplicates and thorough screening only nine
articles were included in this review. Overall, five articles were from the US,
two from the UK and the remaining articles each were from the Republic

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