TY - JOUR
T1 - Title, abstract, and keyword searching resulted in poor recovery of articles in systematic reviews of epidemiologic practice
AU - Penning de Vries, Bas B.L.
AU - van Smeden, Maarten
AU - Rosendaal, Frits R.
AU - Groenwold, Rolf H.H.
N1 - Funding Information:
R.H.H.G. was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Netherlands (NWO-Vidi project 917.16.430). The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily of any funding body.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2020/5
Y1 - 2020/5
N2 - Objective: Article full texts are often inaccessible via the standard search engines of biomedical literature, such as PubMed and Embase, which are commonly used for systematic reviews. Excluding the full-text bodies from a literature search may result in a small or selective subset of articles being included in the review because of the limited information that is available in only title, abstract, and keywords. This article describes a comparison of search strategies based on a systematic literature review of all articles published in 5 top-ranked epidemiology journals between 2000 and 2017. Study Design and Setting: Based on a text-mining approach, we studied how nine different methodological topics were mentioned across text fields (title, abstract, keywords, and text body). The following methodological topics were studied: propensity score methods, inverse probability weighting, marginal structural modeling, multiple imputation, Kaplan-Meier estimation, number needed to treat, measurement error, randomized controlled trial, and latent class analysis. Results: In total, 31,641 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files were downloaded from the journals’ websites. For all methodological topics and journals, at most 50% of articles with a mention of a topic in the text body also mentioned the topic in the title, abstract, or keywords. For several topics, a gradual decrease over calendar time was observed of reporting in the title, abstract, or keywords. Conclusion: Literature searches based on title, abstract, and keywords alone may not be sufficiently sensitive for studies of epidemiological research practice. This study also illustrates the potential value of full-text literature searches, provided there is accessibility of full-text bodies for literature searches.
AB - Objective: Article full texts are often inaccessible via the standard search engines of biomedical literature, such as PubMed and Embase, which are commonly used for systematic reviews. Excluding the full-text bodies from a literature search may result in a small or selective subset of articles being included in the review because of the limited information that is available in only title, abstract, and keywords. This article describes a comparison of search strategies based on a systematic literature review of all articles published in 5 top-ranked epidemiology journals between 2000 and 2017. Study Design and Setting: Based on a text-mining approach, we studied how nine different methodological topics were mentioned across text fields (title, abstract, keywords, and text body). The following methodological topics were studied: propensity score methods, inverse probability weighting, marginal structural modeling, multiple imputation, Kaplan-Meier estimation, number needed to treat, measurement error, randomized controlled trial, and latent class analysis. Results: In total, 31,641 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) files were downloaded from the journals’ websites. For all methodological topics and journals, at most 50% of articles with a mention of a topic in the text body also mentioned the topic in the title, abstract, or keywords. For several topics, a gradual decrease over calendar time was observed of reporting in the title, abstract, or keywords. Conclusion: Literature searches based on title, abstract, and keywords alone may not be sufficiently sensitive for studies of epidemiological research practice. This study also illustrates the potential value of full-text literature searches, provided there is accessibility of full-text bodies for literature searches.
KW - Bibliometrics
KW - Epidemiological methods
KW - Statistical methods
KW - Systematic literature review
KW - Text mining
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079687539&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.01.009
DO - 10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.01.009
M3 - Article
C2 - 31982541
AN - SCOPUS:85079687539
SN - 0895-4356
VL - 121
SP - 55
EP - 61
JO - Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
JF - Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
ER -