A LargeScale Analysis of the Reasons Given for Excluding Articles that areRetrieved by Literature Search During Systematic Review

AMIA 2013 Annual Symposium

Tracy Edinger ; ND ; MCR ; Aaron M. Cohen ; MD ; MS

PID  :  122630

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

Objective: A literature search to identify relevant studies is one of the first steps in performing a systematic review(SR) in support of evidencebased medicine. To maximize efficiency, the search must find practically all relevantstudies and retrieve few that are irrelevant; however, this level of precision is seldom attained. Therefore, manyarticles must be manually examined for relevance. To better understand the limitations of current search tools asapplied to SR, we characterized the most common reasons that papers retrieved by SR searches were excluded fromthe review. Methods: The textual reasons given for retrieved but excluded articles were extracted from 6,743 SRsperformed by 54 Cochrane Collaboration review groups. The frequencies of different exclusion reasons wereanalyzed, and we developed a taxonomy summarizing these reasons. Results: Almost 65% of articles were excludedbecause the means of comparison were inappropriate. Of these, about 72% were due to the randomized controlledtrial (RCT) design being required but not employed by the excluded study. Mismatching interventions and outcomesand incorrect population characteristics were also common reasons for exclusion. Conclusions: Currentlyavailable search methods do not adequately address the most common exclusion reasons for systematic review, even