Search strategies to identify information on adverse effects: a systematic review.

OBJECTIVES

The review evaluated studies of electronic database search strategies designed to retrieve adverse effects data for systematic reviews.

METHODS

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.

RESULTS

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.

CONCLUSIONS

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.