Levay 2022
Appraisal of: "Levay P. Systematic searching in Ovid Embase: understanding the MEDLINE document collection and identifying conference records. medRxiv, 2022."
Reviewer(s):
Juliet Brown
Deirdre Beecher
Full Reference:
Levay P. Systematic searching in Ovid Embase: understanding the MEDLINE document collection and identifying conference records. medRxiv, 2022.
Short description:
The objective of the study was to undertake a test study to explore how document collections within Ovid Embase may be employed to limit search records (such as unique Medline content not available via Embase). The particular example for this study looked at identification of conference records.The test (run March 2022) found Search results NOT Records From MEDLINE was a reliable method to try, this will retain conference records, preprints and material yet to be added to the document collection. This paper recommends combining Records from Conference Abstracts limit, publication types (.pt) conference abstract, conference review, conference paper and source type of conference proceedings. Once unique MEDLINE content has been removed, considerably more results are retained for further examination. Levay says results will vary on a daily basis as new records are added, however this shows EMBASE to be a useful resource for finding conference records. Testing found 5,108,945 conference records on EMBASE for the test period, from a total 36,986,580 (approximately 14%). Removing the unique MEDLINE material, Levay found 5,038,796 which is 690,358 higher than using the Records From Conference Abstracts limit. These findings indicate that using this new method would add to a comprehensive retrieval of conference material from Embase.
Limitations stated by the author(s):
The study is a test piece undertaken by the author.
Limitations stated by the reviewer(s):
This is a single study by the author over one a one day time period, varying the time period or date of search may be a useful further experiment to consider, however the method appears robust.
Study Type:
Single study
Related Chapters:
Clinical Effectiveness
Tags:
Embase
Conference abstracts