Developing search strategies for clinical practice guidelines in SUMSearch and Google Scholar and assessing their retrieval performance

Table 1 Determination of clinical practice guideline terms for the GLAD search strategy in the preliminary study

14 commonly used search terms^†	Retrievals SUMSearch^‡	Retrievals Google Scholar^‡ (estimated number of retrievals)^§	Relevant retrievals CPG term + "back pain"^\|\| (guidelines in the top 20 [DARE 24] retrievals)
Guideline/-s/-*	340,105	1,954,000	58
Practice guideline/-s/-*	139,385	984,000	46
Recommendation/-s/-*	162,239	1,892,000	35
Standard/-s/-*	1,384,650	18,560,000	30
Clinical pathway	3,332	420,000	0
Clinical protocol	76,530	572,000	0
Clinical standard	64,009	872,000	0
Clinical recommendation	3,649	64,900	5
Consensus	62,113	970,000	7
Clinical consensus	12,401	263,000	0
Consensus (SUMSearch: AND) development conferences	6,189	49,700	6
Position paper	7,115	1,740,000	0
Clinical (SUMSearch: AND) position paper	1,085	272,000	0
Good (SUMSearch: AND) clinical practice	6,487	768,000	0

^† The terms 'guideline', 'practice guideline', 'recommendation' and 'standard' were entered into SUMSearch and Google Scholar with the truncation '*', and as singular and plural terms.
^‡ The number of retrievals produced by the respective CPG terms per search engine in the preliminary study.
^§ Defined by Google Scholar as "Results 1–10 of about...."
^|| The number of guidelines identified in SUMSearch by the combination of a CPG term and the MeSH term "back pain".
* = truncation; CPG = Clinical Practice Guideline; GLAD = GuideLine And Disease.

ISSN: 1471-2288