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Appraisal of: Cooper C, Brown A, Court R, Schauberger U. A technical review of the ISPOR Presentations Database identified issues in the search interface and areas for future development. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2022;38(1):e29
Appraisal of: Cooper C, Brown A, Court R, Schauberger U. A technical review of the ISPOR Presentations Database identified issues in the search interface and areas for future development. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2022;38(1):e29
Reviewer(s):
Dave Kaunelis
Julie Glanville
Full Reference:
Cooper C, Brown A, Court R, Schauberger U. A technical review of the ISPOR Presentations Database identified issues in the search interface and areas for future development. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2022 Mar 8;38(1):e29. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0266462322000137/type/journal_article
Short description:
The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, also known as ISPOR, hosts regular conferences and summits where research on health economics is presented. The ISPOR Presentations Database provides free online access to podium and poster presentations from these meetings. The authors used a validated checklist created by Bethel and Rogers to evaluate the search interface and functionality of the ISPOR Presentations Database. The database scored 35 out of a possible 165, with significant issues arising in areas of truncation, search syntax, field codes, controlled vocabulary, display, downloading, search history and performance. The authors present numerous major and minor suggestions to improve the search interface. Suggestions that would significantly improve search performance include: (1) correcting truncation issues for capitalized terms; and (2) allowing any type of quotation mark to be used in phrase searching. An update to the help guide is also recommended.
An update to this paper was published in the same journal, cowritten by the authors of the original paper and ISPOR colleagues. ISPOR has been able to resolve two issues noted in the review through an open dialog with the authors. With these changes, neither capitalization nor the type of quotation marks used will now affect search results. In addition, further improvements suggested in the technical review are being explored, including better user documentation.
Limitations stated by the author(s):
The criteria in the Bethel and Rogers checklist may disadvantage smaller bibliographic databases, such as ISPOR’s database, when scoring search interfaces. Many items in the checklist are less important in smaller databases compared to others such as MEDLINE, including field codes and command line searching. For smaller databases, the checklist could perhaps be modified by offering weighted scoring that focuses on the priorities of the resource.
Limitations stated by the reviewer(s):
No specific limitations are noted by the reviewer, although one suggestion for future research is provided. The authors note that podium and poster presentations from ISPOR meetings are reported in the journal Value in Health, and so available through the Embase database. Further testing of the ISPOR Presentations Database to determine how much unique content exists in this database in comparison with Embase would be of great usefulness to the HTA researcher, who is likely going to search Embase for all major projects.
Study Type:
Single Study
Related Chapters:
Costs and economic evaluation.
Tags:
ISPOR Presentations Database
Conference abstracts
Conference posters
Economics
Supplemental publications to the study
Cooper C, Brown A, Court R, Schauberger U, Pizzi L, Willke R. A technical review of the ISPOR Presentations Database: an update on changes to the database from the authors and ISPOR. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2023 Jan 24;39(1):e8. https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0266462322003324/type/journal_article
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