ArticleJournal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA2006
Development of a subject search filter to find information relevant to palliative care in the general medical literature.
Article in Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, 2006. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Primary palliative care in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review and thematic synthesis of the evidence for models and outcomes.Palliative medicine · 2024Pooled it
- The effectiveness of out-of-hours palliative care telephone advice lines: A rapid systematic review.Palliative medicine · 2024Pooled it
- Pain assessment tools in paediatric palliative care: A systematic review of psychometric properties and recommendations for clinical practice.Palliative medicine · 2022Pooled it
- Are the MORECare guidelines on reporting of attrition in palliative care research populations appropriate? A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.BMC palliative care · 2020Pooled it
- Influences on Care Preferences of Older People with Advanced Illness: A Systematic Review and Thematic Synthesis.Journal of the American Geriatrics Society · 2018Pooled it
- [Glucocorticoids and androgens for treatment of tiredness and weakness in palliative care patients : a systematic review].Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2012Pooled it
- Promoting Public Engagement in Palliative and End-of-Life Care Discussions on Chinese Social Media: Model Development and Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Meeting a need: development and validation of PubMed search filters for immigrant populations.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2024Article
- Public Opinions About Palliative and End-of-Life Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Twitter-Based Content Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2023Article
- Earlier initiation of palliative care in the disease trajectory of people living with dementia: a scoping review protocol.BMJ open · 2021Article
- Earlier multidisciplinary palliative care intervention for people with lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Translational lung cancer research · 2020Review
- Article
- Development and validation of search filters to find articles on palliative care in bibliographic databases.Palliative medicine · 2019Article
- Characteristics and impact of the most-cited palliative oncology studies from 1995 to 2016.BMC cancer · 2018Article
- Finding the Integrated Care Evidence Base in PubMed and Beyond: A Bibliometric Study of the Challenges.International journal of integrated care · 2018Article
- Paramedic literature search filters: optimised for clinicians and academics.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2017Article
- 'Seed + expand': a general methodology for detecting publication oeuvres of individual researchers.Scientometrics · 2014Article
- OvidSP Medline-to-PubMed search filter translation: a methodology for extending search filter range to include PubMed's unique content.BMC medical research methodology · 2013Article
- Evidence for the use of Levomepromazine for symptom control in the palliative care setting: a systematic review.BMC palliative care · 2013Article
- [Methods and development of therapy recommendations for symptom control in palliative medicine].Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2012Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeThe research developed and validated palliative care search filters for use in the general biomedical literature.
methodsFour general medical journals were hand-searched to identify articles relevant to palliative care, forming a "gold standard" reference set. Searches comprising Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and text-words were created for use in Ovid MEDLINE, and retrieved references were compared to the gold standard. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision rates were calculated.
resultsBy hand-searching 20,501 articles published in the 4 journals during the 3-year study period (1999-2001), reviewers identified 773 items relevant to palliative care (3.8%). A master search combining 9 MeSH descriptors with 3 text-words achieved 45.4% sensitivity, 99.3% specificity, 73% precision, and 97.3% accuracy. Efforts to increase the sensitivity by modifying 3 relevant published but unvalidated searches did not improve the yield, except in 1 case which resulted in an improved sensitivity of 56.9% but was offset by reduced specificity (92.1%), precision (22%), and accuracy (90.8%).
conclusionsThe study confirmed that literature relevant to palliative care is difficult to identify in general medical journals. While the filter developed in this research represents the best trade-off between sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision, the sensitivity is unacceptably low. Further research, such as frequency analysis of text-words and MeSH terms, is required to increase the sensitivity of searching in this subset of the literature.
Indexed as
Identifiers
17082830PMC1629429What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.