A highly sensitive search strategy for clinical trials in Literatura Latino Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde (LILACS) was developed.
BACKGROUND
Systematic reviews should include as many articles as possible. However, many systematic reviews use only databases with high English language content as sources of trials. Literatura Latino Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde (LILACS) is an underused source of trials, and there is not a validated strategy for searching clinical trials to be used in this database.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to develop a sensitive search strategy for clinical trials in LILACS.


METHODS
An analytical survey was performed. Several single and multiple-term search strategies were tested for their ability to retrieve clinical trials in LILACS. Sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of each single and multiple-term strategy were calculated using the results of a hand-search of 44 Chilean journals as gold standard.


RESULTS
After combining the most sensitive, specific, and accurate single and multiple-term search strategy, a strategy with a sensitivity of 97.75% (95% confidence interval [CI]=95.98-99.53) and a specificity of 61.85 (95% CI=61.19-62.51) was obtained.


CONCLUSIONS
LILACS is a source of trials that could improve systematic reviews. A new highly sensitive search strategy for clinical trials in LILACS has been developed. It is hoped this search strategy will improve and increase the utilization of LILACS in future systematic reviews.
Manríquez
Juan J
JJ
Department of Dermatology, Unit of Evidence Based Medicine (UMBE-UC), School of Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Vicuña Mackenna #4686, Macul, Santiago, Chile. jmanroquez@dermatoscopio.cl
D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D012196:Review Literature as Topic; D013020:South America