Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Aug 17, 2020
Date Accepted: Oct 24, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Nov 16, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Searching PubMed during the COVID-19 pandemic
ABSTRACT
Background:
The ability to efficiently search the scientific literature is crucial during a pandemic.
Objective:
To measure the performance of different searches in PubMed.
Methods:
We tested PubMed searches for COVID-19 to identify which search strategy performed best according to standard metrics. We evaluated the performance of eight different searches in PubMed during the first ten 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.
Results:
The two most comprehensive search strings performed best, but the single-term search, COVID-19, performed well in terms of sensitivity (98.4/98.7 vs 94.4), positive predictive value (94.6/92.7 vs 95.3), and F-score (96.5/95.7 vs 94.8). We found that deleting a hyphen or space character could omit a substantial number of records. If entered correctly, a single-term search performed well although the number of relevant records would be increased by using a comprehensive search.
Conclusions:
Expert search terms performed better than single term searches in PubMed, but not by a large margin. For day to day searches single term searches are probably fine whereas for systematic reviews more comprehensive searches should be used.
Citation
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Copyright
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