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Description: Abstract Objectives: To investigate the relative coverage of electronic databases used by researchers who wanted to conduct structured reviews on the topic of residential care and inform the conduct of future such reviews. Study design: Methodological study (cross-sectional) Methods: First, I) 37 qualitative and quantitative review articles on the topic of residential care reporting structured database searches were sought (set 1). II) The forward citations (Google Scholar) of these reviews (and their own citations) were then assessed to identify further similar reviews. III) The references of all relevant reviews found in this way were extracted. IV) All references were searched on a set of freely available electronic databases (Pubmed, ERIC, Google Scholar, Science Direct and Social Care Online) commonly used by child welfare researchers to assess their relative coverage. Results: In-between Dec 30, 2020 and May 8, 2021 I screened the forward citations of the reference set (set 1) and all forward citations of eligible reviews found (sets 2-4) and identified 58 additional residential care reviews. The 95 residential care reviews identified were published between 2007 and 2021 and had between 0 and 138 forward citations (total = 2518 citations, mean = 26 citations per review, median = 10 citations per review). Seventy-three reviews (73/95=76.84%) were published in scientific journals, most commonly Children and Youth Services Review (n=23). All 95 included residential care review articles (100%) could be found on Google Scholar. Social Care Online included 49 reviews (51.58%), Science Direct 29 reviews (30.53%) and Pubmed 24 reviews (25.26%). ERIC had the lowest coverage with only 2 reviews identified out of 95 (2.11%). Twenty-six reviews (27.37%) were only found on Google Scholar. Limitations: Assessment of eligibility was subjective, many reviews were likely missed by the search strategy and database coverage may have been underestimated by searches. Funding: No funding was received for this work. Registration and study protocol: See https://osf.io/r34hk/ (December 2020). Data and materials: See https://osf.io/r34hk/. All other data should otherwise be included within this manuscript. Keywords: Children’s homes, residential care, database coverage, electronic searches, systematic review