Locating sex-specific evidence on clinical questions in MEDLINE: a search filter for use on OvidSP™

Table 6 Performance of three filters for locating articles^a reporting sex-specific evidence: SSS, SS MeSH and M&S

Disease	Filter	Number of articles			Recall	Precision
		Reference set	Retrieved by the filter	Retrieved and reporting sex-specific evidence
		(X)	(Y)	(Z)	(Z/X)	(Z/Y)
Alzheimer's disease	SSS	29	57	28	97%	49%
	SS MeSH^b	29	15	10	34%	67%
	M&S^c	29	39	16	55%	41%
Asthma	SSS	69	68	53	77%	78%
	SS MeSH	69	23	20	29%	87%
	M&S	69	79	57	83%	72%
Total	SSS	98	125	81	83%	65%
	SS MeSH	98	38	30	31%	79%
	M&S	98	118	73	74%	62%

^a The filters were applied to articles on original studies of Alzheimer's disease and of asthma in humans, with an abstract, written in English, published in core clinical journals in 2007 and 2008, and included in MEDLINE as of June 13 2008. Thus, 662 articles on original studies were identified, including 219 articles on Alzheimer's disease and 443 articles on asthma.
^b Sex-specific MeSH (SS MeSH) include the following MeSH combined with the operator 'OR': sex factors, sex characteristics, sex distribution, sex, sex ratio and gender identity.
^c Modification of the filter as designed by Montgomery and Sherif [26]. Included were the MeSH terms referring to sex differences, gender issues and women's health, free text words referring to women and the text word gender (see Table 2); excluded was a search in women's health journals.

ISSN: 1471-2288