J Med Libr Assoc. 2021 Apr 1;109(2):258-266. doi: 10.5195/jmla.2021.978.
There are no existing validated search filters for the group of 37 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This study describes how information specialists from the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) developed and evaluated novel OECD countries' geographic search filters for MEDLINE and Embase (Ovid) to improve literature search effectiveness for evidence about OECD countries.
We created the draft filters using an alternative approach to standard filter construction. They are composed entirely of geographic subject headings and are designed to retain OECD country evidence by excluding non-OECD country evidence using the NOT Boolean operator. To evaluate the draft filters' effectiveness, we used MEDLINE and Embase literature searches for three NICE guidelines that retrieved >5,000 search results. A 10% sample of the excluded references was screened to check that OECD country evidence was not inadvertently excluded.
The draft MEDLINE filter reduced results for each NICE guideline by 9.5% to 12.9%. In Embase, search results were reduced by 10.7% to 14%. Of the sample references, 7 of 910 (0.8%) were excluded inadvertently. These references were from a guideline about looked-after minors that concerns both OECD and non-OECD countries.
The draft filters look promising-they reduced search result volumes while retaining most OECD country evidence from MEDLINE and Embase. However, we advise caution when using them in topics about both non-OECD and OECD countries. We have created final versions of the search filters and will validate them in a future study.
目前不存在针对 37 个经济合作与发展组织(OECD)国家的现有经过验证的检索过滤器。本研究描述了英国国家卫生与保健优化研究所(NICE)的信息专家如何开发和评估用于 MEDLINE 和 Embase(Ovid)的新型 OECD 国家地理检索过滤器,以提高有关 OECD 国家的文献检索效果。
我们使用一种替代标准过滤器构建的方法来创建草案过滤器。它们完全由地理主题词组成,旨在通过使用 NOT 布尔运算符排除非 OECD 国家的证据来保留 OECD 国家的证据。为了评估草案过滤器的有效性,我们使用 MEDLINE 和 Embase 对 NICE 的三个指南进行了文献检索,这些指南检索到了超过 5000 个检索结果。对排除的参考文献进行了 10%的样本筛选,以检查是否无意中排除了 OECD 国家的证据。
草案 MEDLINE 过滤器使每个 NICE 指南的结果减少了 9.5%至 12.9%。在 Embase 中,搜索结果减少了 10.7%至 14%。在样本参考文献中,有 7 篇(0.8%)是无意中被排除的。这些参考文献来自一项涉及 OECD 和非 OECD 国家的受照顾未成年人的指南。
草案过滤器看起来很有前途-它们减少了 MEDLINE 和 Embase 的搜索结果量,同时保留了大多数来自 OECD 国家的证据。但是,在涉及非 OECD 和 OECD 国家的主题中使用时,我们建议谨慎。我们已经创建了搜索过滤器的最终版本,并将在未来的研究中对其进行验证。