Wilczynski 2004

Appraisal of: Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB, Lavis JN, Ramkissoonsingh R, Arnold-Oatley AE; HSR Hedges team. Optimal search strategies for detecting health services research studies in MEDLINE. CMAJ. 2004 Nov 9;171(10):1179-85.

Reviewer(s):
Corinne Holubowich

Full Reference:
Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB, Lavis JN, Ramkissoonsingh R, Arnold-Oatley AE; HSR Hedges team. Optimal search strategies for detecting health services research studies in MEDLINE. CMAJ. 2004 Nov 9;171(10):1179-85.

Short description:
The authors described methods used to develop optimal search strategies for detecting health services research (HSR) studies in MEDLINE. The authors built a gold standard database of 25,936 articles through hand searching 68 journals from the year 2000 for study categories of appropriateness, process assessment, outcome assessment, clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), cost and economics of care. The results of the manual review were compared with the retrieval performance of methodologic search terms and phrases in MEDLINE. The sensitivity, specificity and precision of combinations of search terms were calculated. The authors validated search strategies for retrieval of HSR literature found in MEDLINE; and sensitive and specific versions are publicly available through the National Library of Medicine (US) at www.nlm.nih.gov/nichsr/hedges/search.html. Most of the search strategies achieved sensitivity and specificity of at least 80%.

Limitations stated by the author(s):

Authors could not locate secure methodologic features for HSR categories of appropriateness and cost to retrieve best studies. Since the number of appropriateness articles was small, estimates of search performance for that category may have been imprecise. The database of HSR articles created for this study was not large enough to test-retest searches to validate the strategies. The authors did not examine the effect of combining HSR filters with content terms. Ovid MEDLINE was the only search engine tested.

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

Study Type:
Single study

Tags:
Search Filters, Organizational, MEDLINE