Fig. 1

Schematic representation of the Bone-marrow derived mesenchymal stem cell cryopreservation search strategy. Diagram of the current systematic search analysis. Studies of bone-marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells aligned to cryopreservation and/or freezing were identified using a combination of two search terms ‘cryopreservation mesenchymal’ and ‘freezing mesenchymal’ using PubMed, Science direct and Google scholar. The output of each search was scanned at the title level, then at the abstract level and articles were retained when meeting eligibility criteria, both inclusion and exclusion (see boxes titled inclusion criteria and exclusion criteria in this figure). In specific, for the term ‘cryopreservation and mesenchymal’ in PubMed, 695 studies were retrieved. By checking the titles against the eligibility criteria, only 65 studies were retained. The abstracts of these 65 articles were then read and checked against the eligibility criteria and only 36 of the 65 articles were retained. For the subsequent searches, these steps of retaining and eliminating articles were followed but preceded by eliminating duplicates i.e. articles which appeared in previous searches