Protocol for the validation of four search strategies for retrieval of Clinical Practice Guidelines in MEDLINE, Embase and PubMed

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1 Cochrane Hypertension Group and the Therapeutics Initiative, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
2 Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
3 Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
4 Charles Perkins Centre, and School of Pharmacy, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.27149v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Epidemiology, Evidence Based Medicine, Health Policy, Science and Medical Education, Statistics
Keywords
Validation of Search Strategies, Search Filters, Clinical Practice Guidelines, Practice Guidelines, Validation, Sensitivity and Precision, CADTH, University of Texas, Hedge, Search Strategies
Copyright
© 2018 Lunny et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Lunny CA, Salzwedel DM, Liu T, Ramasubbu C, Gerrish S, Puil L, Mintzes B, Wright JM. 2018. Protocol for the validation of four search strategies for retrieval of Clinical Practice Guidelines in MEDLINE, Embase and PubMed. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27149v1

Abstract

Background Guidelines are systematically developed recommendations to assist practitioner and patient decisions about treatments for clinical conditions. Researchers, healthcare professionals and policy makers need to be able to retrieve clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) efficiently and quickly from the literature. Despite the widespread use of CPGs in practice and policy formulation, no filter for retrieval of guidelines has been validated to date. The use of a validated search filter for CPGs would make their retrieval from major bibliographic databases more efficient. Objectives We aim to fill this gap by validating search filters for use in the systematic retrieval of CPGs and measure their performance according to sensitivity and precision.

Methods We found four search filters for retrieval of CPGs (two CADTH, PubMed and University of Texas filters) which we will validate in three databases (MEDLINE, Embase and PubMed). We will derive a test set of CPGs from a search of the TRIP and Epistemonikos databases. The citations retrieved will be randomly sorted and screened sequentially by two reviewers until at least 100 CPGs are included. We will include CPGs that provide at least two explicit recommendations for the treatment of any clinical condition, and that are produced by a group or organization (i.e., not authored by one person) . We will translate the filters into Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, and PubMed syntax as appropriate. Then, we will run the strategies and assess whether the filters retrieved the citations in our test set. We will calculate and compare the sensitivity and precision of the four filters in each database. The limitations of the CADTH, PubMed and University of Texas search filters for each database will be assessed by examining the keywords in the titles and abstracts of the citations not found by the search filters.

Discussion Decision makers, healthcare providers and researcher will be able to choose the most precise and sensitive search strategy among the four available, which will enable them to more efficiently identify relevant clinical practice guidelines.

Author Comment

TBD