ArticleBMC medical research methodology2012
Search strategies to identify reports on "off-label" drug use in EMBASE.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evaluation of the decision-making process underlying the initial off-label use of vaccines: a scoping review protocol.BMJ open · 2021Article
- Developing topic-specific search filters for PubMed with click-through data.Methods of information in medicine · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundMedications are frequently prescribed outside their regulatory approval (off-label) by physicians particularly where appropriate therapies are not available. However, the risk/benefit ratio of drugs in off-label use needs to be critically appraised because it may differ from approved on-label usage. Therefore, an extensive exploration of current evidence on clinical data is well-advised. The objective of this study was to develop a search strategy that facilitates detection of the off-label drug use documents in EMBASE via OvidSP.
methodsWe constructed two sets of gold standards from relevant records to off-label drug use by a sensitive search of MEDLINE and EMBASE. Search queries, including search words and strings, were conceived based on definition of off-label use of medications as well as text analysis of 500 randomly selected relevant documents. The selected terms were searched in EMBASE (from 1988 to 2011) and their retrieval performance was compared with the gold standards. We developed a sensitivity-maximizing, and a sensitivity- and precision-maximizing search strategy.
resultsFrom 4067 records relevant to off-label drug use in our full gold standard set, 3846 records were retrievable from EMBASE. "off label*.af." was the most sensitive single term (overall sensitivity 77.5%, sensitivity within EMBASE 81.9%, precision 88.1%). The highest sensitive search strategy was achieved by combining 36 search queries with overall sensitivity of 94.0% and precision of 69.5%. An optimal sensitive and precise search strategy was yielded precision 87.4% at the expense of decreasing overall sensitivity to 89.4%.
conclusionWe developed highly sensitive search strategies to enhance the retrieval of studies on off-label drug use in OvidSP EMBASE.
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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.