Our Clinical Hedges database contains data for the year 2000 for each article in each of the issues of 170 clinical journals (journal list). 161 of these journals were indexed in MEDLINE (journal list). The MEDLINE search strategies are located on this page. To view the search strategy for EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO, please click on the appropriate link. To find out more about the Hedges Project, click here.

For each purpose category (therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, reviews, clinical prediction guides, qualitative, causation (etiology), costs, economics), the following data are shown: the single term with the highest sensitivity while keeping specificity at ³ 50%; the single term with the highest specificity while keeping the sensitivity ³ 50%; the single term with the least (minimal) absolute difference between sensitivity and specificity; and then the same data for multiple terms (the single term strategy may be shown again if it performs at least as well as multiple terms). In the second column of the table the search strategies are shown in Ovid syntax followed by the PubMed translation. In the third column of the table: sens = sensitivity; spec = specificity; prec = precision; acc = accuracy. References for the methods and individual categories appear at the end of the document.

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References

Wilczynski NL, McKibbon KA, Haynes RB. Enhancing retrieval of best evidence for health care from bibliographic databases: calibration of the hand search of the literature. Medinfo. 2001;10(Pt 1):390-3.

Wong SS, Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB, Ramkissoonsingh R. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting sound clinical prediction studies in MEDLINE. Proc AMIA Symp. 2003;:728-32.

Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound causation studies in MEDLINE. Proc AMIA Symp. 2003;:719-23.

Haynes RB, Wilczynski NL. Optimal search strategies for retrieving scientifically strong studies of diagnosis from MEDLINE: analytical survey. BMJ. 2004;328:1040-2.

Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB; The Hedges Team. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound prognostic studies in MEDLINE. BMC Medicine. 2004;2:23 (5 pages).

Wong SS, Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB. Developing Optimal Search Strategies for Detecting Clinically Relevant Qualitative Studies in MEDLINE. Medinfo. 2004;2004:311-6.

Wilczynski NL, Haynes RB, Lavis JN, Ramkissoonsingh R, Arnold-Oatley A, for the HSR Hedges Team. Optimal search strategies for detecting health services research studies in MEDLINE. CMAJ, 2004 Nov 9;171(10)1179-85. There is free full text for this article at: http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/171/10/1179.

Montori VM, Wilczynski NL, Morgan D, Haynes RB for the Hedges Team. Optimal search strategies for retrieving systematic reviews from MEDLINE: an analytical survey. BMJ. 2005 Jan 8;330(7482):68. Epub 2004 Dec 24. There is free full text for this article at: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/reprint/330/7482/68.

Haynes RB, McKibbon KA, Wilczynski NL, WalterSD, Werre SR; Hedges Team. Optimal search strategies for retrieving scientifically strong studies of treatment from Medline: analytical survey. BMJ. 2005 May 21;330(7501):1179. Epub 2005 May 13.