LETTER TO THE EDITOR

‘‘Identification and Description of Randomized Controlled Trials and Systematic Reviews on Patient Safety Published in Medical Journals’’: A Librarian’s Response To the Editor: he recent article by Barajas-Nava et al1 on the retrieval of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews on patient safety makes a point about the inadequacy of electronic database searching compared with hand-searching journal literature, when their ‘‘trained researcher’’ retrieved only two-thirds of the articles identified by a hand-search of the same journals. Based on their description of the search strategy used in their PubMed search, I and other professional medical librarians have serious reservations about the appropriateness and thoroughness of the search as it was performed. I suggest that the shortfall in retrieval is significantly related to the way the search was structured.

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The search strategy described on p. 80 relies exclusively on combinations of NLM’s Medical Subject Headings (‘‘MeSH terms’’). Although this is a good place to start, it is not nearly enough for comprehensive retrieval. The MeSH term patient safety, for example, was only added to the lexicon in 2012, so there are many articles on the topic published before 2012, which would not have that term applied. PubMed also contains many references which are entered provisionally into the database without full indexing and do not have MeSH terms applied to them. Although the searcher used the term medical errors, he did not search the term medication errors, nor did he search specific types of patient safety issues, such as ‘‘falls, accidental.’’ Adding these terms alone to the search strategy would have retrieved many more articles. This is also why searching keywords (terms that occur in the citation or abstract of the article, independent of MeSH terms) is an essential part of performing a truly comprehensive search. Finally, the searcher restricted his search to articles with abstracts. There are many articles in PubMed, which do not include abstracts, especially ‘‘review articles’’ and the provisionally-entered citations. Here is

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another body of articles lost to retrieval due to the searcher’s search method. I completely agree that hand-searching in combination with electronic searching is the best approach for the most comprehensive retrieval of relevant literature. In this case, however, I must suggest that some of the missed electronic retrieval is due to an inadequate search strategy and that many of those articles would in fact have been found if a more thorough professional search had been conducted. Julie Stielstra, MLS Manager Libraries of Cadence Health Central DuPage Hospital Winfield, IL [email protected] The authors disclose no conflict of interest.

REFERENCE 1. Barajas-Nava L, Calvache J, Lopez-Alcalde J, et al. Identification and description of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews on patient safety published in medical journals. J Patient Saf. 2013; 9:79Y86.

www.journalpatientsafety.com

Copyright © 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

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"Identification and description of randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews on patient safety published in medical journals": a librarian's response.

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