Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound treatment studies in EMBASE.
OBJECTIVE
The ability to accurately identify articles about therapy in large bibliographic databases such as EMBASE is important for researchers and clinicians. Our study aimed to develop optimal search strategies for detecting sound treatment studies in EMBASE in the year 2000.


METHODS
Hand searches of journals were compared with retrievals from EMBASE for candidate search strategies. Six trained research assistants reviewed fifty-five journals indexed in EMBASE and rated articles using purpose and quality indicators. Candidate search strategies were developed for identifying treatment articles and then tested, and the retrievals were compared with the hand-search data. The operating characteristics of the strategies were calculated.


RESULTS
Three thousand eight hundred fifty articles were original studies on treatment, of which 1,256 (32.6%) were methodologically sound. Combining search terms revealed a top performing strategy (random:.tw. OR clinical trial:.mp. OR exp health care quality) with sensitivity of 98.9% and specificity of 72.0%. Maximizing specificity, a top performing strategy (double-blind:.mp. OR placebo:.tw. OR blind: .tw.) achieved a value over 96.0%, but with compromised sensitivity at 51.7%. A 3-term strategy achieved the best optimization of sensitivity and specificity (random:.tw. OR placebo:.mp. OR double-blind:.tw.), with both these values over 92.0%.


CONCLUSIONS
Search strategies can achieve high performance for retrieving sound treatment studies in EMBASE.
Wong
Sharon S-L
SS
School of Nutrition Faculty of Community Services Ryerson University Toronto, Ontario M5B 2K3 Canada. sharonw@ryerson.ca
Wilczynski
Nancy L
NL
Haynes
R Brian
RB
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D011786:Quality Control