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Development and validation of search filters to find articles on palliative care in bibliographic databases.

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Healthcare professionals and researchers in the field of palliative care often have difficulties finding relevant articles in online databases. Standardized search filters may help improve the efficiency and quality of such searches, but prior developed filters showed only moderate performance. AIM:To develop and validate a specific search filter and a sensitive search filter for the field of palliative care. DESIGN:We used a novel, objective method for search filter development. First, we created a gold standard set. This set was split into three groups: term identification, filter development, and filter validation set. After creating the filters in PubMed, we translated the filters into search filters for Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsychINFO, and Cochrane Library. We calculated specificity, sensitivity and precision of both filters. RESULTS:The specific filter had a specificity of 97.4%, a sensitivity of 93.7%, and a precision of 45%. The sensitive filter had a sensitivity of 99.6%, a specificity of 92.5%, and a precision of 5%. CONCLUSION:Our search filters can support literature searches in the field of palliative care. Our specific filter retrieves 93.7% of relevant articles, while 45% of the retrieved articles are relevant. This filter can be used to find answers to questions when time is limited. Our sensitive filter finds 99.6% of all relevant articles and may, for instance, help conducting systematic reviews. Both filters perform better than prior developed search filters in the field of palliative care.

SUBMITTER: Rietjens JA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6439930 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Integrated care is an increasingly important principle for organising healthcare. Integrated care models show promise in reducing resource wastage and service fragmentation whilst improving the accessibility, patient-centredness and quality of care for patients. Those needing reliable access to the growing research evidence base for integrated care can be frustrated by search challenges reflective of the topic's complexity. The aim of this study is to report the empirical development and validation of two search filters for rapid and effective retrieval of integrated care evidence in PubMed. One filter is optimised for recall and the other for precision. METHODS:An Expert Advisory Group comprising international integrated care experts guided the study. A gold standard test set of citations was formed from screening Handbook Integrated Care chapter references for relevance. This set was divided into a Term Identification Set (20%) for determining candidate terms using frequency analysis; a Filter Development Set (40%) for testing performance of term combinations; and a Filter Validation Set (40%) reserved for confirming final filter performance. In developing the high recall filter, recall was steadily increased while maintaining precision at ?50%. Similarly, the high precision filter sought to maximise precision while keeping recall ?50%. For each term combination tested, an approximation of precision was obtained by reviewing the first 100 citations retrieved in Medline for relevance. RESULTS:The gold standard set comprised 534 citations. The search filter optimised for recall ('Broad Integrated Care Search') achieved 86.0-88.3% recall with corresponding low precision (47-53%). The search filter optimised for precise searching ('Narrow Integrated Care Search') demonstrated precision of 73-95% with recall reduced to between 55.9 and 59.8%. These filters are now available as one-click URL hyperlinks in the website of International Foundation for Integrated Care. CONCLUSIONS:The Broad and Narrow Integrated Care Search filters provide potential users, such as policy makers and researchers, seamless, reliable and ongoing access to integrated care evidence for decision making. These filters were developed according to a rigorous and transparent methodology designed to circumvent the challenges of information retrieval posed by this complex, multifaceted topic.

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Development and validation of search filters to find articles on palliative care in bibliographic databases.

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