ArticleJournal of medical Internet research2020
Searching PubMed to Retrieve Publications on the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparative Analysis of Search Strings.
Article in Journal of medical Internet research, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Added Value of Medical Subject Headings Terms in Search Strategies of Systematic Reviews: Comparative Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2024Article
- The NICE search filters for treating and managing COVID-19: validation in MEDLINE and Embase (Ovid).Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2024Article
- Article
- Anxiety among children and adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe: a systematic review protocol.Systematic reviews · 2023Article
- Increase of depression among children and adolescents after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2022Review
- Article
- Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to and utilisation of services for sexual and reproductive health: a scoping review.BMJ global health · 2022Article
- Publication practices during the COVID-19 pandemic: Expedited publishing or simply an early bird effect?Learned publishing : journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers · 2022Article
- COVID-19 Diagnostics: A Panoramic View on Its Present Scenario, Challenges and Solutions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India. Section B · 2022Review
- Search where you will find most: Comparing the disciplinary coverage of 56 bibliographic databases.Scientometrics · 2022Article
- Management of symptomatic patients with suspected mild-moderate COVID-19 in general practice. What was published within the first year of the pandemic? A scoping review.The European journal of general practice · 2021Article
- Redundancy of Terms in Search Strategies. Comment on "Searching PubMed to Retrieve Publications on the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparative Analysis of Search Strings".Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
- Authors' Reply to: Redundancy of Terms in Search Strategies. Comment on "Searching PubMed to Retrieve Publications on the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparative Analysis of Search Strings".Journal of medical Internet research · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSince it was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, COVID-19 has dominated headlines around the world and researchers have generated thousands of scientific articles about the disease. The fast speed of publication has challenged researchers and other stakeholders to keep up with the volume of published articles. To search the literature effectively, researchers use databases such as PubMed.
objectiveThe aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of different searches for COVID-19 records in PubMed and to assess the complexity of searches required.
methodsWe tested PubMed searches for COVID-19 to identify which search string performed best according to standard metrics (sensitivity, precision, and F-score). We evaluated the performance of 8 different searches in PubMed during the first 10 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate how complex a search string is needed. We also tested omitting hyphens and space characters as well as applying quotation marks.
resultsThe two most comprehensive search strings combining several free-text and indexed search terms performed best in terms of sensitivity (98.4%/98.7%) and F-score (96.5%/95.7%), but the single-term search COVID-19 performed best in terms of precision (95.3%) and well in terms of sensitivity (94.4%) and F-score (94.8%). The term Wuhan virus performed the worst: 7.7% for sensitivity, 78.1% for precision, and 14.0% for F-score. We found that deleting a hyphen or space character could omit a substantial number of records, especially when searching with SARS-CoV-2 as a single term.
conclusionsComprehensive search strings combining free-text and indexed search terms performed better than single-term searches in PubMed, but not by a large margin compared to the single term COVID-19. For everyday searches, certain single-term searches that are entered correctly are probably sufficient, whereas more comprehensive searches should be used for systematic reviews. Still, we suggest additional measures that the US National Library of Medicine could take to support all PubMed users in searching the COVID-19 literature.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.