Articlediamond2020

Which are the most sensitive search filters to identify randomized controlled trials in MEDLINE?

Julie Glanville · Eleanor Kotas · Robin M. Featherstone · Gordon Dooley

59 citations0/0 files storedJournal of the Medical Library Association JMLA

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Meta-analysis and systematic reviews scientometrics and bibliometrics research Information Retrieval and Search Behavior

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: The Cochrane Handbook of Systematic Reviews contains search filters to find randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in Ovid MEDLINE: one maximizing sensitivity and another balancing sensitivity and precision. These filters were originally published in 1994 and were adapted and updated in 2008. To determine the performance of these filters, the authors tested them and thirty-six other MEDLINE filters against a large new gold standard set of relevant records. METHODS: We identified a gold standard set of RCT reports published in 2016 from the Cochrane CENTRAL database of controlled clinical trials. We retrieved the records in Ovid MEDLINE and combined these with each RCT filter. We calculated their sensitivity, relative precision, and f-scores. RESULTS: The gold standard comprised 27,617 records. MEDLINE searches were run on July 16, 2019. The most sensitive RCT filter was Duggan et al. (sensitivity=0.99). The Cochrane sensitivity-maximizing RCT filter had a sensitivity of 0.96 but was more precise than Duggan et al. (0.14 compared to 0.04 for Duggan). The most precise RCT filters had 0.97 relative precision and 0.83 sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS: The Cochrane Ovid MEDLINE sensitivity-maximizing RCT filter can continue to be used by Cochrane reviewers and to populate CENTRAL, as it has very high sensitivity and a slightly better precision relative to more sensitive filters. The results of this study, which used a very large gold standard to compare the performance of all known RCT filters, allows searchers to make better informed decisions about which filters to use for their work.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

References

2008Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions 2019Updated guidance for trusted systematic reviews: a new edition of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions 2020Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions 1994Systematic Reviews: Identifying relevant studies for systematic reviews 2013Finding What Works in Health Care: Standards for Systematic Reviews 2002Development of a highly sensitive search strategy for the retrieval of reports of controlled trials using PubMed 2006How to identify randomized controlled trials in MEDLINE: ten years on.2017Identifying reports of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) via a hybrid machine learning and crowdsourcing approach

Cited by

2021Translation and validation of PubMed and Embase search filters for identification of systematic reviews, intervention studies, and observational studies in the field of first aid 2022Development and evaluation of a search filter to identify prognostic factor studies in Ovid MEDLINE 2022Avoiding searching for outcomes called for additional search strategies: a study of Cochrane review searches 2022Results publications are inadequately linked to trial registrations: An automated pipeline and evaluation of German university medical centers

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.