Development of a subject search filter to find information relevant to palliative care in the general medical literature.
PURPOSE: The research developed and validated palliative care search filters for use in the general biomedical literature. METHODS: Four general medical journals were hand-searched to identify articles relevant to palliative care, forming a 'gold standard' reference set. Searches comprising Medical...
| Publicado en: | Journal of the Medical Library Association Vol. 94; no. 4; pp. 394 - 402 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , |
| Formato: | tables/charts Journal Article |
| Publicado: |
University of Pittsburgh, University Library System
Oct2006
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ccm&AN=106235067&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ccm uiTerm: 106235067 longDbName: CINAHL Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: dissinfo: jinfo: jid: 15365050 PI8 jtl: Journal of the Medical Library Association issn: 15365050 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2006 vid: 94 iid: 4 pid: 60406 pub: University of Pittsburgh, University Library System place: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania artinfo: ui: 106235067 106235067 2009337907 NLM17082830 106235067 ppf: 394 ppct: 8 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P tig: atl: Development of a subject search filter to find information relevant to palliative care in the general medical literature. aug: au: Sladek R Tieman J Fazekas BS Abernethy AP Currow DC affil: Flinders University of South Australia, Bedford Park, South Australia, Australia. ruth.sladek@flinders.edu.au sug: subj: Computerized Literature Searching Methods Information Retrieval Methods Medical Literature Medline Palliative Care Access to Information Data Analysis Software Subject Headings ab: PURPOSE: The research developed and validated palliative care search filters for use in the general biomedical literature. METHODS: Four general medical journals were hand-searched to identify articles relevant to palliative care, forming a 'gold standard' reference set. Searches comprising Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and text-words were created for use in Ovid MEDLINE, and retrieved references were compared to the gold standard. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision rates were calculated. RESULTS: By hand-searching 20,501 articles published in the 4 journals during the 3-year study period (1999-2001), reviewers identified 773 items relevant to palliative care (3.8%). A master search combining 9 MeSH descriptors with 3 text-words achieved 45.4% sensitivity, 99.3% specificity, 73% precision, and 97.3% accuracy. Efforts to increase the sensitivity by modifying 3 relevant published but unvalidated searches did not improve the yield, except in 1 case which resulted in an improved sensitivity of 56.9% but was offset by reduced specificity (92.1%), precision (22%), and accuracy (90.8%). CONCLUSIONS: The study confirmed that literature relevant to palliative care is difficult to identify in general medical journals. While the filter developed in this research represents the best trade-off between sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision, the sensitivity is unacceptably low. Further research, such as frequency analysis of text-words and MeSH terms, is required to increase the sensitivity of searching in this subset of the literature. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: tables/charts Journal Article ougenre: Article language: English refInfo: holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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