title: Retrieval of publications addressing shared decision making: an evaluation of full-text searches on medical journal websites.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Full-text searches of articles increase the recall, defined by the proportion of relevant publications that are retrieved. However, this method is rarely used in medical research due to resource constraints. For the purpose of a systematic review of publications addressing shared decision making, a full-text search method was required to retrieve publications where shared decision making does not appear in the title or abstract.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The objective of our study was to assess the efficiency and reliability of full-text searches in major medical journals for identifying shared decision making publications.
  
  
  METHODS
  A full-text search was performed on the websites of 15 high-impact journals in general internal medicine to look up publications of any type from 1996-2011 containing the phrase "shared decision making". The search method was compared with a PubMed search of titles and abstracts only. The full-text search was further validated by requesting all publications from the same time period from the individual journal publishers and searching through the collected dataset.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The full-text search for "shared decision making" on journal websites identified 1286 publications in 15 journals compared to 119 through the PubMed search. The search within the publisher-provided publications of 6 journals identified 613 publications compared to 646 with the full-text search on the respective journal websites. The concordance rate was 94.3% between both full-text searches.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Full-text searching on medical journal websites is an efficient and reliable way to identify relevant articles in the field of shared decision making for review or other purposes. It may be more widely used in biomedical research in other fields in the future, with the collaboration of publishers and journals toward open-access data.
authors: Department of Ambulatory Care and Community Medicine, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. xavier.blanc2@chuv.ch.
authors: Xavier
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-2800
authors: X
authors: Blanc
authors: Tinh-Hai
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3243-1222
authors: TH
authors: Collet
authors: Reto
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4222-4849
authors: R
authors: Auer
authors: Pablo
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0796-3275
authors: P
authors: Iriarte
authors: Jan
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9375-2102
authors: J
authors: Krause
authors: France
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2296-6696
authors: F
authors: Légaré
authors: Jacques
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1166-9829
authors: J
authors: Cornuz
authors: Carole
authors: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5281-0943
authors: C
authors: Clair
keywords: PubMed; decision making; full-text search; information storage and retrieval; shared decision making; systematic reviews; text mining