Golder Su, Loke Yoon
Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, United Kingdom.
J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Apr;97(2):84-92. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.97.2.004.
The review evaluated studies of electronic database search strategies designed to retrieve adverse effects data for systematic reviews.
Studies of adverse effects were located in ten databases as well as by checking references, hand-searching, searching citations, and contacting experts. Two reviewers screened the retrieved records for potentially relevant papers.
Five thousand three hundred thirteen citations were retrieved, yielding 19 studies designed to develop or evaluate adverse effect filters, of which 3 met the inclusion criteria. All 3 studies identified highly sensitive search strategies capable of retrieving over 95% of relevant records. However, 1 study did not evaluate precision, while the level of precision in the other 2 studies ranged from 0.8% to 2.8%. Methodological issues in these papers included the relatively small number of records, absence of a validation set of records for testing, and limited evaluation of precision.
The results indicate the difficulty of achieving highly sensitive searches for information on adverse effects with a reasonable level of precision. Researchers who intend to locate studies on adverse effects should allow for the amount of resources and time required to conduct a highly sensitive search.
本综述评估了旨在检索用于系统评价的不良反应数据的电子数据库检索策略研究。
通过在十个数据库中检索不良反应研究,以及检查参考文献、手工检索、检索引文和联系专家等方式进行。两名评审员筛选检索到的记录以寻找潜在相关论文。
共检索到5313条引文,产生了19项旨在开发或评估不良反应筛选器的研究,其中3项符合纳入标准。所有3项研究均确定了能够检索超过95%相关记录的高度敏感检索策略。然而,1项研究未评估精确性,另外2项研究的精确性水平在0.8%至2.8%之间。这些论文中的方法学问题包括记录数量相对较少、缺乏用于测试的验证记录集以及对精确性的评估有限。
结果表明,要以合理的精确性水平实现对不良反应信息的高度敏感检索存在困难。打算查找不良反应研究的研究人员应考虑进行高度敏感检索所需的资源和时间量。