Enfermero Profesional

BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making
Study protocol

BioMed Central

Open Access

An overview of the design and methods for retrieving high-quality studies for clinical care
Nancy L Wilczynski1, Douglas Morgan1, R Brian Haynes*1,2,3 and the Hedges Team1
Address: 1Health Information Research Unit, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton,Ontario, Canada, 2Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and 3Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Email: Nancy L Wilczynski - wilczyn@mcmaster.ca; Douglas Morgan - dmorgan127@cogeco.ca; R Brian Haynes* - bhaynes@mcmaster.ca; the Hedges Team - wilczyn@mcmaster.ca * Corresponding authorPublished: 21 June 2005 BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2005, 5:20 6947-5-20 doi:10.1186/1472-

Received: 14 December 2004 Accepted: 21 June 2005

This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/5/20 © 2005 Wilczynski et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract
Background: With the information explosion, the retrieval of the best clinical evidence from large, general purpose, bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE can be difficult. Both researchers conducting systematicreviews and clinicians faced with a patient care question are confronted with the daunting task of searching for the best medical literature in electronic databases. Many have advocated the use of search filters or "hedges" to assist with the searching process. The purpose of this report is to describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrievingsound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronics databases. Objective: To describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronic databases. Design: An analytic survey comparing hand searches of 170 journals in the year 2000 with retrievals from MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL,and PsycINFO for candidate search terms and combinations. The sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of unique search terms and combinations of search terms were calculated. Conclusion: A study design modeled after a diagnostic testing procedure with a gold standard (the hand search of the literature) and a test (the search terms) is an effective way of developing, testing, andvalidating search strategies for use in large electronic databases.

Background
The Clinical Hedges Study was designed with the objective of developing optimal search strategies to improve the retrieval of clinically relevant and scientifically sound study reports from large, general purpose, biomedical

research bibliographic databases including MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO. The searchstrategies were developed to 1) assist health care providers to do their own searches; 2) help reviewers of published evidence concerning health care interventions retrieve all

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relevant citations; 3) provide resources for librarians tohelp health care providers construct their own searches; and 4) provide input to the database producers about their indexing processes and the organization of their databases. Data for the Clinical Hedges Study was collected throughout the year 2000 and continued into the year 2001. Database construction and analyses are ongoing with some of our pre-study results (calibration of the hand search)...