Identification of Randomized Controlled Trials From the Emergency Medicine Literature: Comparison of Hand Searching Versus MEDLINE Searching☆,☆☆,★
Section snippets
INTRODUCTION
With the advent of new journals, the amount of scientific literature is ever increasing. As a result, health care professionals are more likely to rely on review articles to keep abreast of developments. Review articles are therefore very influential, but they often are subjective appraisals and syntheses of selected published works and consequently carry a potential for the introduction of bias by the reviewers.1 In addition, reviews carried out nonsystematically may lead to seriously
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Volunteers to assist with hand searching of the emergency medicine literature were identified by 4 different approaches. First, all listed members of the British Association for Emergency Medicine (BAEM) and the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine (SAEM) received a standard letter outlining the objectives of the work and the background to the Cochrane Collaboration and requesting help with the hand searching of the emergency medicine literature. Every member from the alphabetical listing
RESULTS
The results of the comparison of motives for active participation in hand searching of the literature by emergency medicine professionals are presented as response rates from members of the BAEM and SAEM by type of letter heading in Table 1.
Approach Total No. of Contacts No. of Responders (% of Contacts) Total No. of Actual Hand Searchers (% of Contacts)
DISCUSSION
The response rates from mailing to members of the relevant professional organizations letters requesting participation in this work were very low and suggested that such an approach was not cost-effective. However, no formal costing exercise was undertaken, nor do any formal cost comparisons for other recruitment methods exist. The higher response rate from the British organization may have occurred because the Cochrane Collaboration was established in the United Kingdom and was only emerging
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the complimentary subscriptions received from 11 journals and the efforts of the 46 volunteers who retrospectively and prospectively hand searched 18 journals. In addition, we thank Iain Chalmers, Kay Dickersin, Chris Silagy, Caroline Goldfrad, Phil Alderson and, more recently, the anonymous journal referees for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.
Journals providing complimentary subscriptions: Injury , Burns, Accident and Emergency Nursing , Resuscitation
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Cited by (40)
Handsearching had best recall but poor efficiency when exporting to a bibliographic tool: case study
2020, Journal of Clinical EpidemiologyCitation Excerpt :Handsearching involves a manual, page-by-page examination of the entire contents of relevant journals, conference proceedings, and abstracts [2,4,7,9,16–18]. There is evidence that handsearching is effective when compared with bibliographic database searching and that handsearching can identify studies (or study data) which may be missed by other search methods [4,5,7,13,16,17,19–26]. While handsearching is known to be an effective method of study identification, it is resource intensive [5].
Systematic review identifies six metrics and one method for assessing literature search effectiveness but no consensus on appropriate use
2018, Journal of Clinical EpidemiologyEvidence based emergency nursing: Designing a research question and searching the literature
2017, International Emergency NursingMedication adherence interventions that target subjects with adherence problems: Systematic review and meta-analysis
2016, Research in Social and Administrative PharmacyCitation Excerpt :Searches were conducted in 19 research registers (e.g., Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools), and investigators were contacted to obtain research reports of those studies.94,107,108 Hand searches were conducted in 57 journals where multiple eligible papers in the parent project were published.109,110 Potentially eligible studies were imported into bibliographic software and subsequently tracked with study-specific custom fields and terms.
MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane index most primary studies but not abstracts included in orthopedic meta-analyses
2009, Journal of Clinical EpidemiologyCitation Excerpt :It also provides some important data regarding the percentage of relevant articles one may expect to find in MEDLINE and EMBASE when searching for this topic. The results we found were similar to those of other works completed in nonsurgical disciplines that investigated the performance of databases, such as MEDLINE and EMBASE [15,16,20,22–27]. We believe that this is the first study attempting to quantify the recall rates of the major biomedical databases as they relate to primary research used for orthopedic-related meta-analyses.
The Cochrane Library as a Resource for Evidence on Out-of-Hospital Health Care Interventions
2007, Annals of Emergency MedicineCitation Excerpt :To our knowledge, this is the first time that the evidence in the Cochrane Library has been assessed for relevance to out-of-hospital health care interventions. Although the number of systematic reviews and reports of out-of-hospital trials identified is low in comparison to that of other medical specialities, the number of trials identified by this study is much larger than those reported in previous out-of-hospital literature searching efforts.3-5,7,8,17,18 In conclusion, although the Cochrane Library is a valuable resource for out-of-hospital interventions, the topic coverage is sparse.
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Supported by the Researchand Development Directorateof the North West RegionalHealth Authority, UK (grant No. 0925/704267), and the Faculty of Accident and Emergency Medicine, England, and the Cochrane Injuries Group.
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Address for reprints: Kathy Rowan, MSc, PhD, Scientific Director, ICNARC, Tavistock House,Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HR, UK; 0171-388-2856,fax 0171-388-3759;E-mail [email protected].
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