Abstract
BackgroundSystematic reviews often investigate the effectiveness of interventions for one sex. However, identifying interventions with data presented according to the sex of study participants can be challenging due to suboptimal indexing in bibliographic databases and poor reporting in titles and abstracts. The purposes of this study were to develop a highly sensitive search filter to identify literature relevant to men's health and to assess the performance of a range of sex-specific search terms used individually and in various combinations.MethodsComprehensive electronic searches were undertaken across a range of databases to inform a series of systematic reviews investigating obesity management for men. The included studies formed a reference standard set. A set of sex-specific search terms, identified from database-specific controlled vocabularies and from natural language used in the titles and abstracts of relevant papers, was investigated in MEDLINE and Embase. Sensitivity, precision, number needed to read (NNR) and percent reduction in results compared to searching without sex-specific terms were calculated.ResultsThe reference standard set comprised 57 papers in MEDLINE and 63 in Embase. Seven sex-specific search terms were identified. Searching without sex-specific terms returned 31,897 results in MEDLINE and 37,351 in Embase and identified 84% (MEDLINE) and 83% (Embase) of the reference standard sets. The best performing individual sex-specific term achieved 100%/98% sensitivity (MEDLINE/Embase), NNR 544/609 (MEDLINE/Embase) and reduced the number of results by 18%/17% (MEDLINE/Embase), relative to searching without sex-specific terms. The best performing filter, compromising different combinations of controlled vocabulary terms and natural language, achieved higher sensitivity (MEDLINE and Embase 100%), greater reduction in number of results (MEDLINE/Embase 24%/20%) and greater reduction in NNR (MEDLINE/Embase 506/578) than the best performing individual sex-specific term.ConclusionsThe proposed MEDLINE and Embase filters achieved high sensitivity and a reduction in the number of search results and NNR, indicating that they are useful tools for efficient, comprehensive literature searching but their performance is partially dependent on the appropriate use of database controlled vocabularies and index terms.
Highlights
IntroductionIdentifying interventions with data presented according to the sex of study participants can be challenging due to suboptimal indexing in bibliographic databases and poor reporting in titles and abstracts
Systematic reviews often investigate the effectiveness of interventions for one sex
There is a growing body of published research evidence relating to sex/gender differences in non-sex-specific conditions and that these studies are difficult to identify in bibliographic databases [1]
Summary
Identifying interventions with data presented according to the sex of study participants can be challenging due to suboptimal indexing in bibliographic databases and poor reporting in titles and abstracts. The purposes of this study were to develop a highly sensitive search filter to identify literature relevant to men's health and to assess the performance of a range of sex-specific search terms used individually and in various combinations. Notwithstanding sex-specific conditions and diseases, such as prostate cancer or pregnancy-related illnesses, the research questions of systematic reviews can often focus on one particular sex/gender so it is important to develop methods for efficient retrieval of relevant literature, with sufficient confidence in the comprehensiveness of the search methods. There is a growing body of published research evidence relating to sex/gender differences in non-sex-specific conditions and that these studies are difficult to identify in bibliographic databases [1]. Sex can affect how men and women use health services and how they are treated by health care professionals [6]
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