Search strategies to identify information on adverse effects: a systematic review

J Med Libr Assoc. 2009 Apr;97(2):84-92. doi: 10.3163/1536-5050.97.2.004.

Abstract

Objectives: The review evaluated studies of electronic database search strategies designed to retrieve adverse effects data for systematic reviews.

Methods: Studies of adverse effects were located in ten databases as well as by checking references, hand-searching, searching citations, and contacting experts. Two reviewers screened the retrieved records for potentially relevant papers.

Results: Five thousand three hundred thirteen citations were retrieved, yielding 19 studies designed to develop or evaluate adverse effect filters, of which 3 met the inclusion criteria. All 3 studies identified highly sensitive search strategies capable of retrieving over 95% of relevant records. However, 1 study did not evaluate precision, while the level of precision in the other 2 studies ranged from 0.8% to 2.8%. Methodological issues in these papers included the relatively small number of records, absence of a validation set of records for testing, and limited evaluation of precision.

Conclusions: The results indicate the difficulty of achieving highly sensitive searches for information on adverse effects with a reasonable level of precision. Researchers who intend to locate studies on adverse effects should allow for the amount of resources and time required to conduct a highly sensitive search.

Publication types

  • Evaluation Study
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Review
  • Systematic Review

MeSH terms

  • Abstracting and Indexing / statistics & numerical data
  • Databases, Factual* / classification
  • Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions*
  • Guidelines as Topic
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Meta-Analysis as Topic
  • Periodicals as Topic
  • Quality Control
  • Research Design
  • Review Literature as Topic
  • Vocabulary, Controlled*