Clinicians and readers rely on accurate identification of articles to answer clinical questions and explore hypotheses. Commonly, these questions relate to the outcome and survival of dental treatments. Errors in indexing and inconsistencies in descriptions of these studies have meant that such articles are difficult to locate. To help address this problem, sensitive, precise and optimized electronic search strategies have been developed, and this article aims to explain how these new strategies can be used. These electronic search strategies have been shown to improve the identification of dental survival analyses.