Errors in search strategies used in systematic reviews and their effects on information retrieval

Ref ID 326
First Author J. A. Salvador-Oliván
Journal JOURNAL OF THE MEDICAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION: JMLA
Year Of Publishing 2019
URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466507/pdf/jmla-107-210.pdf
Keywords • General medical
• Searching
Problem(s) • Errors or omissions in search strategy
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Spain
Aim To assess searches performed in MEDLINE/PubMed to identify errors and determine their effects on information retrieval for systematic reviews indexed in PubMed in January of 2018.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings 92.7% of included reviews contained some type of error. Errors that affected recall were the most frequent (78.1%), and the most common search errors involved missing terms in both natural language and controlled language and those related to Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) search terms and the non-retrieval of their more specific terms.
Number of systematic reviews included 137
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 677
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description