Section of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, 1142, New Zealand.
Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, University of Otago, Box 56, Dunedin, PO, 9054, New Zealand.
Syst Rev. 2019 Apr 11;8(1):94. doi: 10.1186/s13643-019-1009-5.
Efforts to improve health equity should be informed by the best available evidence. However, equity-related research is inconsistently indexed, and uses a variety of terms to describe key concepts, making it difficult to reliably identify all relevant studies. We report the development and validation of a search strategy for studies investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status, using the field of transport and health as an example.
Adapting previously described methods, we followed four steps: generation of a test set of eligible studies, search strategy development, search strategy validation, and documentation.
Drawing from 12 systematic reviews, supplemented by additional studies identified by experts and colleagues, we identified a test set of 11 studies that met our eligibility criteria. We assigned five studies to a development set, which we used to develop and refine our search strategy. We assigned the remaining six studies to a validation set, against which we tested our final search strategy. The final search strategy identified all studies in both validation and development sets.
The validated search strategy derived in this study facilitates the conduct of systematic reviews and other literature searches investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status and may be further developed in future for other equity-focused searches and reviews.
为了改善健康公平，应该参考最好的现有证据。然而，与公平相关的研究没有被一致地索引，并且使用各种术语来描述关键概念，使得很难可靠地识别所有相关的研究。我们报告了一种搜索策略的开发和验证，该策略用于研究干预措施的效果是否因种族或社会经济地位而异，以交通与健康领域为例。
采用以前描述的方法，我们遵循了四个步骤：生成合格研究的测试集、搜索策略的开发、搜索策略的验证和文档编制。
从 12 项系统评价中，通过专家和同事确定的额外研究进行补充，我们确定了符合我们资格标准的 11 项测试研究。我们将五项研究分配到开发集中，用于开发和改进我们的搜索策略。我们将其余六项研究分配到验证集中，用于测试我们的最终搜索策略。最终的搜索策略确定了验证和开发集中的所有研究。
本研究中得出的经过验证的搜索策略有助于进行系统评价和其他文献搜索，以研究干预措施的效果是否因种族或社会经济地位而异，并且可以在未来为其他关注公平的搜索和评价进一步开发。
