Abstract:
BACKGROUND:Systematic reviewers seek to comprehensively search for relevant studies and summarize these to present the most valid estimate of intervention effectiveness. The more resources searched, the higher the yield, and thus time and costs required to conduct a systematic review. While there is an abundance of evidence to suggest how extensive a search for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) should be, it is neither conclusive nor consistent. This systematic review was conducted in order to assess the value of different resources to identify trials for inclusion in systematic reviews. METHODS:Seven electronic databases, four journals and Cochrane Colloquia were searched. Key authors were contacted and references of relevant articles screened. Included studies compared two or more sources to find RCTs or controlled clinical trials (CCTs). A checklist was developed and applied to assess quality of reporting. Data were extracted by one reviewer and checked by a second. Medians and ranges for precision and recall were calculated; results were grouped by comparison. Meta-analysis was not performed due to large heterogeneity. Subgroup analyses were conducted for: search strategy (Cochrane, Simple, Complex, Index), expertise of the searcher (Cochrane, librarian, non-librarian), and study design (RCT and CCT). RESULTS:Sixty-four studies representing 13 electronic databases met inclusion criteria. The most common comparisons were MEDLINE vs. handsearching (n = 23), MEDLINE vs. MEDLINE+handsearching (n = 13), and MEDLINE vs. reference standard (n = 13). Quality was low, particularly for the reporting of study selection methodology. Overall, recall and precision varied substantially by comparison and ranged from 0 to 100% and 0 to 99%, respectively. The trial registries performed the best with median recall of 89% (range 84, 95) and median precision of 96.5% (96, 97), although these results are based on a small number of studies. Inadequate or inappropriate indexing was the reason most cited for missing studies. Complex and Cochrane search strategies (SS) performed better than Simple SS. CONCLUSION:Multiple-source comprehensive searches are necessary to identify all RCTs for a systematic review, although indexing needs to be improved. Although trial registries demonstrated the highest recall and precision, the Cochrane SS or a Complex SS in consultation with a librarian are recommended. Continued efforts to develop CENTRAL should be supported.
journal_name
BMC Med Res Methodoljournal_title
BMC medical research methodologyauthors
Crumley ET,Wiebe N,Cramer K,Klassen TP,Hartling Ldoi
10.1186/1471-2288-5-24keywords:
subject
Has Abstractpub_date
2005-08-10 00:00:00pages
24issn
1471-2288pii
1471-2288-5-24journal_volume
5pub_type
杂志文章,评审abstract:BACKGROUND:Evidence syntheses, and in particular systematic reviews (SRs), have become one of the cornerstones of evidence-based health care. The Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) tool has become the most widely used tool for investigating the methodological quality of SRs and is currently undergoing r...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0183-6
更新日期:2016-08-26 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Identifying and assessing degree and type of frailty among older persons is a major challenge when targeting high risk populations to identify preventive interventions. The Vulnerable Elders Survey-(VES-13) is a simple instrument to identify frailty defined as risk for death, functional decline or institutio...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-0910-x
更新日期:2020-02-05 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The lack of suitable and reliable scales to measure self-reported health and health behaviour among people with intellectual disabilities (ID) is an important methodological challenge in health research. This study, which was undertaken together with co-researchers with ID, explores possibilities for self-re...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0539-1
更新日期:2018-07-16 00:00:00
abstract::The recently published "COSMIN" guidelines aim to rate properties of outcome instruments and state two issues with regard to responsiveness which is the instrument's ability to detect change over time. These issues are comparison of score changes with change of an external criterion using correlations and the judgemen...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 评论,信件
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-152
更新日期:2011-11-18 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:To accurately predict the response to treatment, we need a stable and effective risk score that can be calculated from patient characteristics. When we evaluate such risks from time-to-event data with right-censoring, Cox's proportional hazards model is the most popular for estimating the linear risk score. ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-01063-2
更新日期:2020-07-06 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Glaucoma is a leading cause of avoidable blindness worldwide. Open angle glaucoma is the most common type of glaucoma. No randomised controlled trials have been conducted evaluating the effectiveness of glaucoma screening for reducing sight loss. It is unclear what the most appropriate intervention to be eva...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 临床试验,杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-54
更新日期:2011-04-21 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Outcomes in observational studies may not best estimate those expected in the HIV vaccine efficacy trials. We compared retention in Simulated HIV Vaccine Efficacy Trials (SiVETs) and observational cohorts drawn from two key populations in Uganda. METHODS:Two SiVETs were nested within two observational cohor...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-00920-4
更新日期:2020-02-12 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The systematic collection of high-quality mortality data is a prerequisite in designing relevant drowning prevention programmes. This descriptive study aimed to assess the quality (i.e., level of specificity) of cause-of-death reporting using ICD-10 drowning codes across 69 countries. METHODS:World Health O...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-10-30
更新日期:2010-04-08 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Researchers and policy makers have determined that accounting for productivity costs, or "indirect costs," may be as important as including direct medical expenditures when evaluating the societal value of health interventions. These costs are also important when estimating the global burden of disease. The ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-87
更新日期:2012-06-25 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Syntheses of qualitative studies can inform health policy, services and our understanding of patient experience. Meta-ethnography is a systematic seven-phase interpretive qualitative synthesis approach well-suited to producing new theories and conceptual models. However, there are concerns about the quality ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-119
更新日期:2014-11-19 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Diagnostic tests are performed in a subset of the population who are at higher risk, resulting in undiagnosed cases among those who do not receive the test. This poses a challenge for estimating the prevalence of the disease in the study population, and also for studying the risk factors for the disease. ME...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0447-9
更新日期:2017-12-12 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Most electronic search efforts directed at identifying primary studies for inclusion in systematic reviews rely on the optimal Boolean search features of search interfaces such as DIALOG and Ovid. Our objective is to test the ability of an Ultraseek search engine to rank MEDLINE records of the included studi...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-6-7
更新日期:2006-02-24 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Action research (AR) and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are usually considered to be theoretically and practically incompatible. However, we argue that their respective strengths and weaknesses can be complementary. We illustrate our argument from a recent study assessing the effect of telemonitoring on...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,随机对照试验
doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0175-6
更新日期:2016-06-08 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The weighted estimators generally used for analyzing case-cohort studies are not fully efficient and naive estimates of the predictive ability of a model from case-cohort data depend on the subcohort size. However, case-cohort studies represent a special type of incomplete data, and methods for analyzing inc...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-24
更新日期:2012-03-09 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Collection of buccal cells from saliva for DNA extraction offers a less invasive and convenient alternative to venipuncture blood collection that may increase participation in genetic epidemiologic studies. However, dried blood spot collection, which is also a convenient method, offers a means of collecting ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-9-76
更新日期:2009-11-13 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Studies in both paediatric and psychiatric settings often experience problems in recruitment. This can compromise the ability of the study to recruit to target, meaning studies are potentially underpowered. It can also result in a biased sample if a non-representative group are selectively recruited. Recruit...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0730-z
更新日期:2019-04-27 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Mediation is an important issue considered in the behavioral, medical, and social sciences. It addresses situations where the effect of a predictor variable X on an outcome variable Y is explained to some extent by an intervening, mediator variable M. Methods for addressing mediation have been available for ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0296-6
更新日期:2017-03-21 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Chemotherapy is expected to reduce cancer deaths (CD), while possibly being harmful in terms of non-cancer deaths (NCD) because of toxicity. Peto's log-rank test is popular in the medical literature, but its operating characteristics are barely known. We compared this test to the most common ones in the stat...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-72
更新日期:2014-05-29 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:This article describes the design and baseline sample of a single-site trial comparing Individual Placement and Support (IPS) supported employment delivered within a Veterans Health Administration (VHA) primary care Patient Aligned Care Team (PACT) to treatment-as-usual vocational rehabilitation (TAU-VR) tha...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,随机对照试验
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-0919-1
更新日期:2020-02-17 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Clinical quality registries and other systems that conduct routine post-discharge surveillance of patient outcomes following surgery may have difficulty surveying patients who have limited proficiency in the language of the healthcare provider. Interpreter proxies (family and carers) are often used due to li...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0854-1
更新日期:2019-11-14 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:It is notoriously difficult to recruit patients to randomised controlled trials in primary care. This is particularly true when the disease process under investigation occurs relatively infrequently and must be investigated during a brief time window. Bell's palsy, an acute unilateral paralysis of the facial...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,随机对照试验
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-7-15
更新日期:2007-03-28 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Claims databases are generally considered inadequate for obesity research due to suboptimal capture of body mass index (BMI) measurements. This might not be true for bariatric surgery because of reimbursement requirements and changes in coding systems. We assessed the availability and validity of claims-base...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-01106-8
更新日期:2020-09-07 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The initial vanguard cohort of the U.S. National Children's Study was a pregnancy and birth cohort study that sought to enroll some women prior to pregnancy, and to assess exposures early in pregnancy. METHODS:During the recruitment phase (2009-2010), geographically based sampling was used to recruit women ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0067-1
更新日期:2015-09-24 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:For practical reasons it is not easy to obtain fasting samples in large population health surveys. Non-fasting triglyceride (Tg) values are difficult to interpret. The authors compared the accuracy of statistically corrected non-fasting Tg values with true fasting values and estimated the misclassification o...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-63
更新日期:2011-05-10 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Many medicines are dosed to achieve a particular therapeutic range, and monitored using therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM). The evidence base for a therapeutic range can be evaluated using systematic reviews, to ensure it continues to reflect current indications, doses, routes and formulations, as well as upd...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0363-z
更新日期:2017-06-02 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The development of risk prediction models is of increasing importance in medical research - their use in practice, however, is rare. Among other reasons this might be due to the fact that thorough validation is often lacking. This study focuses on two Bayesian approaches of how to validate a prediction rule ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-99
更新日期:2012-07-20 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) are increasingly used in studies in healthcare research but there is still little empirical evidence for the predictive value of these hypothetical situations in similar real life circumstances. The aim of this paper is to compare the stated preferences in a DCE and the acc...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0010-5
更新日期:2015-03-12 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The COVID-19 pandemic has evolved into one of the most impactful health crises in modern history, compelling researchers to explore innovative ways to efficiently collect public health data in a timely manner. Social media platforms have been explored as a research recruitment tool in other settings; however...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-01011-0
更新日期:2020-05-13 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Family members are increasingly involved in the care of cancer patients, however many are not prepared for this challenging role. Intervention-based studies are valuable to inform the most appropriate and effective support for caregivers. Barriers in the recruitment of patient/caregiver dyads exist but the r...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,多中心研究,随机对照试验
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0614-7
更新日期:2018-11-21 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Defeat and entrapment have been shown to be of central relevance to the development of different disorders. However, it remains unclear whether they represent two distinct constructs or one overall latent variable. One reason for the unclarity is that traditional factor analytic techniques have trouble estim...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0470-5
更新日期:2018-01-25 00:00:00