Sampson Margaret, Zhang Li, Morrison Andra, Barrowman Nicholas J, Clifford Tammy J, Platt Robert W, Klassen Terry P, Moher David
Chalmers Research Group, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute, Canada.
BMC Med Res Methodol. 2006 Jul 18;6:33. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-6-33.
Search filters or hedges play an important role in evidence-based medicine but their development depends on the availability of a "gold standard"--a reference standard against which to establish the performance of the filter. We demonstrate the feasibility of using relative recall of included studies from multiple systematic reviews to validate methodological search filters as an alternative to validation against a gold standard formed through hand searching.
We identified 105 Cochrane reviews that used the Highly Sensitive Search Strategy (HSSS), included randomized or quasi-randomized controlled trials, and reported their included studies. We measured the ability of two published and one novel variant of the HSSS to retrieve the MEDLINE-index studies included in these reviews.
The systematic reviews were comprehensive in their searches. 72% of included primary studies were indexed in MEDLINE. Relative recall of the three strategies ranged from .98 to .91 across all reviews and more comprehensive strategies showed higher recall.
An approach using relative recall instead of a hand searching gold standard proved feasible and produced recall figures that were congruent with previously published figures for the HSSS. This technique would permit validation of a methodological filter using a collection of approximately 100 studies of the chosen design drawn from the included studies of multiple systematic reviews that used comprehensive search strategies.
检索过滤器或检索限定词在循证医学中发挥着重要作用，但其开发依赖于“金标准”的可用性——一种用于确立过滤器性能的参考标准。我们证明了使用来自多个系统评价的纳入研究的相对召回率来验证方法学检索过滤器的可行性，以此作为针对通过手工检索形成的金标准进行验证的替代方法。
我们识别出105项Cochrane系统评价，这些评价使用了高度敏感检索策略（HSSS），纳入了随机或半随机对照试验，并报告了其纳入研究。我们测量了已发表的两种以及一种新的HSSS变体检索这些评价中所包含的MEDLINE索引研究的能力。
这些系统评价的检索全面。纳入的原始研究中有72%被MEDLINE索引。在所有评价中，三种策略的相对召回率在0.98至0.91之间，更全面的策略显示出更高的召回率。
使用相对召回率而非手工检索金标准的方法被证明是可行的，并且得出的召回率数据与先前发表的HSSS数据一致。该技术将允许使用从采用全面检索策略的多个系统评价的纳入研究中抽取的约100项所选设计的研究集合来验证方法学过滤器。
