Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comparative Study
. 2005 Jun 21:5:20.
doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-5-20.

An overview of the design and methods for retrieving high-quality studies for clinical care

Nancy L Wilczynski  1 , Douglas Morgan, R Brian Haynes; Hedges Team
Affiliations
Comparative Study

An overview of the design and methods for retrieving high-quality studies for clinical care

Nancy L Wilczynski et al. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. .

Abstract

Background: With the information explosion, the retrieval of the best clinical evidence from large, general purpose, bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE can be difficult. Both researchers conducting systematic reviews and clinicians faced with a patient care question are confronted with the daunting task of searching for the best medical literature in electronic databases. Many have advocated the use of search filters or "hedges" to assist with the searching process. The purpose of this report is to describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronics databases.

Objective: To describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronic databases.

Design: An analytic survey comparing hand searches of 170 journals in the year 2000 with retrievals from MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO for candidate search terms and combinations. The sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of unique search terms and combinations of search terms were calculated.

Conclusion: A study design modeled after a diagnostic testing procedure with a gold standard (the hand search of the literature) and a test (the search terms) is an effective way of developing, testing, and validating search strategies for use in large electronic databases.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Steps in data collection.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Wilczynski NL, McKibbon KA, Haynes RB. Enhancing retrieval of best evidence for health care from bibliographic databases: calibration of the hand search of the literature. Medinfo. 2001;10:390–393. - PubMed
    1. Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound causation studies in MEDLINE. Proc AMIA Symp. 2003:719–23. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wong SS, Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB, Ramkissoonsingh R. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting sound clinical prediction studies in MEDLINE. Proc AMIA Symp. 2003:728–32. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Haynes RB, Wilczynski NL. Optimal search strategies for retrieving scientifically strong studies of diagnosis from MEDLINE: analytical survey. BMJ. 2004;328:1040–1042. doi: 10.1136/bmj.38068.557998.EE. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB. The Hedges Team. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound prognostic studies in MEDLINE. BMC Medicine. 2004;2:23. doi: 10.1186/1741-7015-2-23. 5 pages. - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources