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Table 2 Performance of different PubMed search strategies

From: A comparison of metrics and performance characteristics of different search strategies for article retrieval for a systematic review of the global epidemiology of kidney and urinary diseases

 

SuHeSS

FreeWoSS

Intercept of FreeWoSS and SuHeSSa

Performance indicators (with 95% CI) of the search strategy for obtaining articles used for full-text estimation in comparison with the ‘gold standard’ set

 Sensitivity

85.3 (81.3–88.7)

94.5 (91.7–96.5)

79.8 (75.4–83.7)

 Specificity

55.9 (55.3–56.5)

20.9 (20.5–21.4)

76.8 (76.3–77.3)

 Precision

2.5 (2.2–2.7)

1.5 (1.4–1.7)

4.3 (3.8–4.8)

 Accuracy

56.3 (55.7–56.8)

21.9 (21.4–22.4)

76.8 (76.4–77.3)

Number of bibliographic records excluded by the search strategy from the overall PubMed ‘gold standard’ set at a given step

 Initial search

16,313

6108

22,421

 Potentially useful abstracts

612

250

862

 Selected for full-text extraction

66

26

92

 Obtained as a full-text and data extracted

56

21

77

Percentage of bibliographic records excluded by the search strategy from the overall PubMed ‘gold standard’ set at a given step

 Initial search

55.4

20.7

76.1

 Potentially useful abstracts

29.8

12.2

41.9

 Selected for full-text extraction

14.7

5.8

20.4

 Obtained as a full text and data extracted

14.7

5.5

20.2

Extracted data rows excluded by the search strategy from the overall data rows extracted from PubMed full-text articles

 Number of data rows excluded by the strategy

1222

117

1339

 Percentage of data rows excluded by the strategy

15.8

1.5

17.3

  1. aintercept means the set of records captured both by SuHeSS and FreeWoSS
  2. SuHeSS Subject headings based search strategy, FreeWoSS Free word search strategy
  3. Correspondence between description in the table and step number (see Methods): Initial search – step 1 and 2; Potentially useful abstracts – step 3; Selected for full-text extraction – step 5; Obtained as a full-text and data extracted – step 6 and 7