Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The review evaluated studies of electronic database search strategies designed to retrieve adverse effects data for systematic reviews.
METHODS: Studies of adverse effects were located in ten databases as well as by checking references, hand-searching, searching citations, and contacting experts. Two reviewers screened the retrieved records for potentially relevant papers.
RESULTS: Five thousand three hundred thirteen citations were retrieved, yielding 19 studies designed to develop or evaluate adverse effect filters, of which 3 met the inclusion criteria. All 3 studies identified highly sensitive search strategies capable of retrieving over 95% of relevant records. However, 1 study did not evaluate precision, while the level of precision in the other 2 studies ranged from 0.8% to 2.8%. Methodological issues in these papers included the relatively small number of records, absence of a validation set of records for testing, and limited evaluation of precision.
CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate the difficulty of achieving highly sensitive searches for information on adverse effects with a reasonable level of precision. Researchers who intend to locate studies on adverse effects should allow for the amount of resources and time required to conduct a highly sensitive search.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 84-92 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2009 |
Keywords
- Abstracting and Indexing as Topic
- Databases, Factual
- Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions
- Guidelines as Topic
- Humans
- Information Storage and Retrieval
- Meta-Analysis as Topic
- Periodicals as Topic
- Quality Control
- Research Design
- Review Literature as Topic
- Vocabulary, Controlled
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