Fig. 1

Flowchart of study selection. As shown in Fig. 1, a total of 2275 potential journal articles were identified by searches, of which 78 were found through the screening of references. Seven hundred sixty-four duplicates were removed. Of the 1511 remaining articles, 1474 were excluded due to the defined eligibility criteria. The reasons for exclusion were documented for each investigated abstract and full-text, namely, another definition of transferability, transferability was not a topic of the article, the article addressed a developing country, exclusively focused on transferability of economic evaluations, or was written in a language other than English or German. Finally, 37 articles were included in the thematic synthesis, of which 9 were found through snowball sampling