Carol Jane Lefebvre

This chapter outlines some general issues in searching for studies; describes the main sources of potential studies; and discusses how to plan the search process, design and carry out search strategies, manage references found during the search process, correctly document the search process and select studies from the search results. It provides ad...

The revised edition of the Handbook offers the only guide on how to conduct, report and maintain a Cochrane Review. The second edition of The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions contains essential guidance for preparing and maintaining Cochrane Reviews of the effects of health interventions. Designed to be an accessible resou...

Introduction: Cochrane Reviews take a systematic and comprehensive approach to identifying studies that meet the eligibility criteria for the review. Members of the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group (IRMG) have recently updated the Cochrane Handbook chapter on methods for searching and selecting studies. The chapter reflects the IRMG's a...

Clinical trial data are essential for assessments of the effectiveness of healthcare interventions. Information about ongoing or completed, but not yet formally published, trials has been more difficult to identify until the development of clinical trials registers and portals. This paper summarises research evidence on identifying sources of trial...

Background Effective study identification is essential for conducting health research, developing clinical guidance and health policy and supporting health-care decision-making. Methodological search filters (combinations of search terms to capture a specific study design) can assist in searching to achieve this. Objectives This project investigat...

Objective: To develop an evidence-based guideline for Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) for systematic reviews (SRs), health technology assessments, and other evidence syntheses. Study design and setting: An SR, Web-based survey of experts, and consensus development forum were undertaken to identify checklists that evaluated or...

Background Methodological search filters are tools for retrieving database records reporting studies which use a specific research method. Choosing a filter is likely to be based on filter performance data. This review examines which measures are reported, and the way that filter performance is presented, in filter comparisons.Methods Studies were...

Search filters or hedges are search strategies developed to assist information specialists and librarians to retrieve different types of evidence from bibliographic databases. The objectives of this project were to learn about searchers' filter use, how searchers choose search filters and what information they would like to receive to inform their...

The Cochrane Collaboration was established in 1993, following the opening of the UK Cochrane Centre in 1992, at a time when searching for studies for inclusion in systematic reviews was not well-developed. Review authors largely conducted their own searches or depended on medical librarians, who often possessed limited awareness and experience of s...

This work is a sub-project of a larger project entitled “Searching for unpublished trials using trials registers and trials web sites and obtaining unpublished trial data and corresponding trial protocols from regulatory agencies”. The objective of this project was to prepare an annotated bibliography of published studies addressing searching for a...

Complex and highly sensitive electronic literature search strategies are required for systematic reviews; however, no guidelines exist for their peer review. Poor searches may fail to identify existing evidence because of inadequate recall (sensitivity) or increase the resource requirements of reviews as a result of inadequate precision. Our object...

Decisions about the effectiveness of healthcare interventions should be based on sound evidence, such as a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Access to the results of trials, however, is problematic. Not all trials are published. Those that are published may be difficult to locate if they are published only in the grey literature or...

The authors developed a tool to assess the quality of search filters designed to retrieve records for studies with specific research designs (e.g., diagnostic studies). The UK InterTASC Information Specialists' Sub-Group (ISSG), a group of experienced health care information specialists, reviewed the literature to evaluate existing search filter ap...

Our aims were: (i) to identify all reports of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, (ii) to assess the number of these that were available in EMBASE and PsycLIT, and (iii) to investigate the precision of search strategies, designed for 100% sensitivity, for each of the above databases. The Internation...

Randomized trials are essential in assessing the effects of healthcare interventions and are a key component in systematic reviews of effectiveness. Searching for reports of randomized trials in databases is problematic due to the absence of appropriate indexing terms until the 1990s and inconsistent application of these indexing terms thereafter....

Abstract in Chinese (simplified characters).

Abstract in Chinese (traditional characters).

Abstract in Spanish.

Abstract in French.

To determine the sensitivity and precision of existing search strategies for retrieving child health systematic reviews in MEDLINE using PubMed. Filter (diagnostic) accuracy study. We identified existing search strategies for systematic reviews, combined them with a filter that identifies articles relevant to child health, and applied the combinati...

To assess the performance of published search filters in finding diagnostic test accuracy studies. Diagnostic test accuracy search filters were identified by searching medline, our own files and by requesting unpublished filters from colleagues. We applied the filters to a case study review of diagnostic test accuracy studies for urinary tract infe...

Systematic reviewers need to decide how best to reduce bias in identifying studies for their review. Even when journals are indexed in electronic databases, it can still be difficult to identify all relevant studies reported in these journals. Over 1700 journals have been or are being handsearched within The Cochrane Collaboration to identify repor...

The researchers sought to assess whether the widely used 1994 Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy (HSSS) for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in MEDLINE could be improved in terms of sensitivity, precision, or parsimony. A gold standard of 1,347 RCT records and a comparison group of 2,400 non-trials were randomly selected from MEDLINE. Ter...

Objective The quality of a Health Technology Assessment (HTA) report is dependent on the accuracy and completeness of the evidence base and this is dependent on the quality of the search. However, a validated process for evaluating the quality and completeness of the evidence base for systematic reviews does not exist. This project will see the dev...

Trauma, burns or surgery can cause people to lose large amounts of blood. Fluid replacement, giving fluids intravenously (into a vein), is used to help restore blood volume and hopefully reduce the risk of dying. Blood products (including human albumin), non-blood products or combinations can be used. The review of trials found no evidence that alb...

This study aims to compare handsearching to a basic MEDLINE search for the identification of reports of randomized trials in specialized health care journals. Twenty-two specialized health care journals, published in the U.K., were handsearched for all reports of controlled trials (as defined by the Cochrane Collaboration). The reports of trials, w...

The Cochrane Collaboration has established a centralized database of controlled trials and other studies of health care interventions (called CENTRAL) that serves as the best available resource for all those preparing and maintaining systematic reviews or otherwise searching for trials. CENTRAL is available on The Cochrane Library. This article des...

A fundamental aim of any systematic review is that all relevant studies should be identified and considered for inclusion. Limitations with searching bibliographic databases led the Cochrane Collaboration to search journals by hand for reports of trials. This article presents the results of a 3-year project to identify and make accessible reports o...

Randomized trials are important for controlling selection biases, and where sufficient numbers of participants are involved, have the potential to yield reliable estimates of treatment effects. We investigated trends in the number and size of randomized trials reported in general health care journals from 1948 to 1997. From the handsearching of 18...

Search filters are increasingly used to search medical databases to identify specific topics or study designs. In particular, search filters have been designed to help health-care professionals identify systematic reviews of the effectiveness of health interventions. Identifying systematic reviews in databases such as MEDLINE is problematic and res...

Problem: Worldwide, over one million people die and about 10 million people sustain permanent disabilities each year in road traffic crashes. It is a matter of urgency that effective strategies, especially from existing controlled trials (CTs), are identified for crash prevention programs. Methods: We used word frequency analysis to develop a searc...

Human albumin solutions are used in a range of medical and surgical problems. Licensed indications are the emergency treatment of shock and other conditions where restoration of blood volume is urgent, burns, and hypoproteinaemia. Human albumin solutions are more expensive than other colloids and crystalloids. To quantify the effect on mortality of...

Background: systematic reviews are of increasing importance to health care professionals seeking to provide evidence-based health care, because they provide systematically prepared summaries of the current state of research knowledge on the effectiveness of health care interventions. To be able to make use of them, both researchers preparing system...

In 1994 the European Union BIOMED programme awarded £330 000 to a project, coordinated by the UK Cochrane Centre, to identify reports of randomised controlled trials in general health care journals in Europe. The rationale is that reports of randomised controlled trials are difficult to identify through sources such as Medline.1 For example, a stud...

This paper attempts to explain why systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials, based on as high a proportion as possible of the relevant studies, are so important in generating reliable information for evidence-based decision making within health care. The preparation, maintenance and dissemination of such reviews is the challenge which has...

To examine the sensitivity and precision of Medline searching for randomised clinical trials. Comparison of results of Medline searches to a "gold standard" of known randomised clinical trials in ophthalmology published in 1988; systematic review (meta-analysis) of results of similar, but separate, studies from many fields of medicine. Randomised c...

Synopsis Valid reviews of the effects of mental health care depend on identifying as high a proportion as possible of relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs). To investigate the sensitivity and precision both of MEDLINE and of hand-searching for RCTs in mental health, 12 journals specializing in mental health and indexed by the National Librar...

Final keynote presentation of the 10th International Congress on Medical Librarianship.