Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Oct 18, 2023
Date Accepted: Jul 7, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Using the MeSH thesaurus coupled with text words compared to using text words alone: A comparative analysis from PubMed queries in systematic reviews
ABSTRACT
Background:
The massive increase in the number of publications enhances scientific and medical knowledge but makes it more complicated to summarize research results. The MeSH thesaurus was created in the mid-20th century with the aim of systematizing indexing and facilitating publication retrieval. Despite the advent of search engines, few studies have questioned the relevance of the MeSH thesaurus and none has done so in a systematic manner.
Objective:
The objective of the present work was to evaluate the utility of MeSH terms in Pubmed queries for systematic literature reviews.
Methods:
We selected systematic literature reviews published in four prestigious journals between 2012 and 2021 and for which a PubMed query was provided. Each original query (V1) was transformed to obtain a version with free text terms only (V2) and a version with MeSH terms only (V3). The three queries were compared with regard to their sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV).
Results:
A total of 70 systematic literature reviews were included. Three V1 queries (4.3%) contained MeSH terms only, 8 (11.4%) contained free text terms only, and 59 (84.3%) contained both MeSH terms and free text terms. The transition from V1 to V2 had no effect on the number of relevant articles retrieved for 39 of the 70 reviews (56%). The deletion of MeSH terms decreased the median sensitivity (from 50.0% for V1 to 42.4% for V2) and increased the median PPV (from 1.3% for V1 to 1.6% for V2). Conversely, the deletion of free text terms decreased the median sensitivity (from 50% for V1 to 16.7% for V3) and decreased the median PPV (from 1.6% for V2 to 1.0% for V3). In other words, queries containing MeSH terms and free text terms provide an average of 4 additional relevant papers per SR but an additional 769 papers have to be screened.
Conclusions:
For researchers building a PubMed query for a systematic literature review, MeSH terms do not appear to be essential. In fact, MeSH terms sometimes slightly increase the number of relevant articles identified but significantly increase the workload required for filtering. Hence, MeSH terms should never be used alone.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.