title: Estimating the Horizon of articles to decide when to stop searching in systematic reviews: an example using a systematic review of RCTs evaluating osteoporosis clinical decision support tools.
abstract: Researchers conducting systematic reviews need to search multiple bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE and EMBASE. However, researchers have no rational search stopping rule when looking for potentially-relevant articles. We empirically tested a stopping rule based on the concept of capture-mark-recapture (CMR), which was first pioneered in ecology. The principles of CMR can be adapted to systematic reviews and meta-analyses to estimate the Horizon of articles in the literature with its confidence interval. We retrospectively tested this Horizon Estimation using a systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that evaluated clinical decision support tools for osteoporosis disease management. The Horizon Estimation was calculated based on 4 bibliographic databases that were included as the main data sources for the review in the following order: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and EBM Reviews. The systematic review captured 68% of known articles from the 4 data sources, which represented 592 articles that were estimated as missing from the Horizon.
authors.affiliation: University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, USA.
authors.forename: Monika
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kastner
authors.forename: Sharon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Straus
authors.forename: Charlie H
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Goldsmith
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods; D016239:MEDLINE; D010024:Osteoporosis / Q000628:therapy; D016032:Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D000078202:Systematic Reviews as Topic