Introduction: The move towards evidence-based health care through locating, reviewing and synthesizing the results of soundly designed evaluations of interventions needs to be paralleled by similar work in the field of health promotion initiatives. Identifying productive search strategies forms an important part of the basis of this work. Because of the different disciplines involved in health promotion evaluation, these strategies are likely to differ from those found to be useful in the health care field.

Objective: The main objective of the study reported in this paper is to test the responsiveness of different electronic databases relevant to health promotion to search strategies using a core set of keywords.

Methods: The following electronic databases will be keyworded to search for reports of evaluated health promotion interventions: Embase, Uncover, PsycLit, Eric, the Social Sciences Citation Index and Medline.

Results: The results will be presented in terms of the productiveness of the same keywording strategy with the different databases, defined in terms of the number of soundly designed evaluations (meeting the 4 criteria of having equivalent intervention and control groups, reporting on pre- and post-intervention characteristics, and reporting on all the outcome measures specified) generated.

Discussion: Conclusions will be drawn about the usefulness of different keywords and electronic databases to those wishing to identify soundly designed evaluations in the health promotion field.