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Review

Finding Evidence for Comparing Medical Interventions

Rose Relevo  1 , Howard Balshem  1
In: Methods Guide for Effectiveness and Comparative Effectiveness Reviews [Internet]. Rockville (MD): Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US); 2008.
AHRQ Methods for Effective Health Care.
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Review

Finding Evidence for Comparing Medical Interventions

Rose Relevo et al.
Free Books & Documents

Excerpt

While, this article both describes and advises on the process of literature searching in support of comparative effectiveness reviews (CERs) for the Effective Health Care Program, it does not address searching for previously published systematic reviews, which is discussed in other articles in this series.,

Searches to support systematic reviews often require judgment calls about where to search, how to balance recall and precision, and when the point of diminishing returns has been reached. Searchers with more experience with complex search strategies are better equipped to make these decisions. A number of reviews of the quality of systematic reviews suggest that those reviews that employed a librarian or other professional searcher had better reporting of and more complex search strategies.

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References

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    1. Whitlock EP, Lopez SA, Chang S, et al. Identifying, selecting, and refining topics for comparative effectiveness systematic reviews: AHRQ and the Effective Health Care program. J Clin Epidemiol. 2009 Jun 18; - PubMed
    1. Medical Library Association. Role of expert searching in health sciences libraries: Policy statement by the Medical Library Association adopted September 2003. J Med Libr Assoc. 2005 Jan;93(1):42–44. - PMC - PubMed
    1. McGowan J, Sampson M. Systematic reviews need systematic searchers. J Med Libr Assoc. 2005 Jan;93(1):74–80. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Golder S, Loke Y, McIntosh HM. Poor reporting and inadequate searches were apparent in systematic reviews of adverse effects. J Clin Epidemiol. 2008 May;61(5):440–448. - PubMed

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