Simon

Appraisal of: Simon M, Hausner E, Klaus SF, Dunton NE. Identifying nurse staffing research in Medline: development and testing of empirically derived search strategies with the PubMed interface. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2010 Aug 23;10:76.

Reviewer(s):
Corinne Holubowich

Full Reference:
Simon M, Hausner E, Klaus SF, Dunton NE. Identifying nurse staffing research in Medline: development and testing of empirically derived search strategies with the PubMed interface. BMC Med Res Methodol. 2010 Aug 23;10:76.

Short description:
The authors described methods used to identify nurse staffing research in MEDLINE. A development set of three systematic reviews (referencing 78 papers) examining nurse staffing in relation to patient outcomes was used to mine free-text and Medical Subject Heading terms. The identified terms were used to build three search strategies that represented the most sensitive, most precise and best balance of the two.

To assess the precision of the newly developed strategies, the authors performed several tests. The frequency of the nurse staffing research terms found in the development set were tested against a sample from PubMed/MEDLINE, a pool of extracted references from the systematic reviews, a reference set from electronic journal screening, and finally, compared to PubMed’s Health Services Research Queries filter.

The sensitive search strategy caught nearly 100% of the relevant references, while the precise strategy caught between 6.1% and 32.0%. The number needed to screen (NNR) was identified as 297 references for the sensitive search. The precise strategy caught one out of three references.

Limitations stated by the author(s):

Authors declared that the selection of the systematic reviews used to populate the development set were not searched for systematically. Authors also stated that the developed search filter would rely on indexing available in MEDLINE and may miss citations in process.

Limitations stated by the reviewer(s):
No additional limitations detected by the reviewer.

Study Type:
Single study

Tags:
Search Filters, Organizational, Nursing