Development of a subject search filter to find information relevant to palliative care in the general medical literature.
OBJECTIVE
The research developed and validated palliative care search filters for use in the general biomedical literature.


METHODS
Four general medical journals were hand-searched to identify articles relevant to palliative care, forming a "gold standard" reference set. Searches comprising Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and text-words were created for use in Ovid MEDLINE, and retrieved references were compared to the gold standard. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision rates were calculated.


RESULTS
By hand-searching 20,501 articles published in the 4 journals during the 3-year study period (1999-2001), reviewers identified 773 items relevant to palliative care (3.8%). A master search combining 9 MeSH descriptors with 3 text-words achieved 45.4% sensitivity, 99.3% specificity, 73% precision, and 97.3% accuracy. Efforts to increase the sensitivity by modifying 3 relevant published but unvalidated searches did not improve the yield, except in 1 case which resulted in an improved sensitivity of 56.9% but was offset by reduced specificity (92.1%), precision (22%), and accuracy (90.8%).


CONCLUSIONS
The study confirmed that literature relevant to palliative care is difficult to identify in general medical journals. While the filter developed in this research represents the best trade-off between sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision, the sensitivity is unacceptably low. Further research, such as frequency analysis of text-words and MeSH terms, is required to increase the sensitivity of searching in this subset of the literature.
Sladek
Ruth
R
Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia. ruth.sladek@flinders.edu.au
Tieman
Jennifer
J
Fazekas
Belinda S
BS
Abernethy
Amy P
AP
Currow
David C
DC
D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D010166:Palliative Care; D010506:Periodicals as Topic; D009626:Terminology as Topic