We identified existing search strategies for systematic reviews, combined them with a filter that identifies articles relevant to child health, and applied the combination in MEDLINE to a reference set of child health systematic reviews. Reporting of specific systematic review criteria in titles and abstracts is poor, and reporting recommendations given by Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses QUOROM should be used more strictly.
To make identification using MEDLINE easier, there is an urgent need to set minimal criteria that any review should fulfill for it to be indexed as a systematic review.
Well-conducted systematic reviews provide the best evidence to guide clinical practice, are cornerstones for the recommendations of evidence-based practice guidelines, and should be an integral part of the planning of future research. Clinicians and researchers should be able to reliably and quickly find systematic reviews. Two types of systematic reviews can be identified in current bibliographic databases: 1 the Cochrane systematic reviews, which can be found in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the Cochrane Library and 2 systematic reviews published in journals journal reviews.
Bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE index Cochrane reviews and can be used to identify other systematic reviews, but only those indexed in the respective database.
Several search strategies for locating systematic reviews in MEDLINE have been developed and validated 6 - 9 ; however, to our knowledge, the performance of these filters has never been evaluated in the universe of all articles included in MEDLINE, nor have they been tested for sensitivity and precision in finding child health systematic reviews. The objective of the present study was to assess the usefulness of existing search filters in finding child health systematic reviews in MEDLINE using the PubMed interface by applying them to a reference standard of child health systematic reviews and by determining whether these filters focus the search strategy sufficiently to be practical in the universe of MEDLINE.
