PubMed Bramer WM, Giustini D, Kramer BMR. Abbreviations: EM Embase, ML MEDLINE, WoS Web of Science, GS Google Scholar. [26] found that Cochrane CENTRAL included 95% of all RCTs included in the reviews investigated. MEDLINE's Scientific Quality Review is a rigorous, multi-step process in which many factors are assessed. Even when taking into account that many searchers consider the use of Scopus as a replacement of Embase, plus taking into account the large overlap of Scopus and Web of Science, this estimate remains similar. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment (1982), United States National Library of Medicine, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "Internet Access to the National Library of Medicine", "Number of Titles Currently Indexed for Index Medicus and MEDLINE on Pubmed", "The proportion of cancer-related entries in PubMed has increased considerably; is cancer truly "The Emperor of All Maladies"? 1990;23:58393. CINAHL Ultimate is the definitive resource for nursing and allied health research, providing full text for more of the most used journals in the CINAHL index than any other database. This study also highlights once more that searching databases alone is, nevertheless, not enough to retrieve all relevant references. [16] Journals that no longer meet the criteria are removed. 2004;12:22832. In short, the method consists of an efficient way to combine thesaurus terms and title/abstract terms into a single line search strategy. The third key database we identified in this research, Web of Science, is only mentioned as a citation index in the Cochrane Handbook, not as a bibliographic database. The selection of databases used when carrying out literature searching for a systematic review can have a significant impact upon the number of records retrieved and the subsequent stages of the review in terms of time and resources spent as well as the review's conclusions. Why Use CINAHL? - CINAHL Guide - LibGuides at Barry University Melissa Rethlefsen receives funding in part from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UL1TR001067. and transmitted securely. The 2 most frequently used resources were journals (print and online) and the MEDLINE database. 2011. Rethlefsen ML, Farrell AM, Osterhaus Trzasko LC, Brigham TJ. If this resulted in extraneous results, the search was subsequently limited using a distinct part of the title or a second author name. MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) premier bibliographic database that contains references to journal articles in life sciences, with a concentration on biomedicine.. MEDLINE content is searchable via PubMed and constitutes the primary component of PubMed, a literature database developed and maintained by the NLM National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). We estimate more than 50% of reviews that include more study types than RCTs would miss more than 5% of included references if only traditional combination of MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane CENTAL is searched. Levay P, Raynor M, Tuvey D. The contributions of MEDLINE, other bibliographic databases and various search techniques to NICE public health guidance. [11][12][13] Most systematic review articles published presently build on extensive searches of MEDLINE to identify articles that might be useful in the review. Optimal searches in systematic reviews should search at least Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar as a minimum requirement to guarantee adequate and efficient coverage. Springer Nature. Investigators and information specialists searching for relevant references for a systematic review (SR) are generally advised to search multiple databases and to use additional methods to be able to adequately identify all literature related to the topic of interest [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ]. We will briefly describe the research methodologies used in high quality studies on treatment (interventions), diagnosis (screening and assessment), prognosis, causation, as well as systematic reviews and qualitative studies as described in the purpose and procedure section, and relate these to terms and phrases that can be applied for searching. Using data sources beyond PubMed has a modest impact on the results of systematic reviews of therapeutic interventions. The most common topic in the database is Cancer with around 12% of all records between 1950-2016, which have risen from 6% in 1950 to 16% in 2016. For example, around a third of the reviews (37%) relied on the combination of MEDLINE and Embase. 2001 Apr;34(2):8598. This is different from internet search engines like Google that only search for the same words. A database of biomedical literature created and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, a unit of the National Institutes of Health). The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. baseline data: The objective data obtained from a patient or subject set before randomisation and entry in a clinical trial. Some concluded that searching only one database can be sufficient as searching other databases has no effect on the outcome [16, 17]. However, particular analyses of the literature or database developments . Would you like email updates of new search results? To ensure adequate performance in searches (i.e., recall, precision, and number needed to read), we find that literature searches for a systematic review should, at minimum, be performed in the combination of the following four databases: Embase, MEDLINE (including Epub ahead of print), Web of Science Core Collection, and Google Scholar. Our earlier research had resulted in 206 systematic reviews published between 2014 and July 2016, in which the first author was affiliated with Erasmus MC [21]. The largest percentage of records in PubMed comes from MEDLINE (95%), which contains 25 million . Article A case study using a systematic review of frozen shoulder management. A secondary aim is to investigate the current practice of databases searched for published reviews. Wilkins T, Gillies RA, Davies K. EMBASE versus MEDLINE for family medicine searches: can MEDLINE searches find the forest or a tree? So through PubMed we are able to access this wealth of knowledge; it's an . It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. Privacy Conclusions: Unlike using a typical Internet search engine, PubMed searching of MEDLINE requires a little investment of time. Thedatabaseisstructuredusingmedical subjectsubheadings (MeSHterms) toclassifythecontent of references; indexingisdonemanuallyusingMeSHtermsaskeywords. A total of 58 published systematic reviews were included, totaling 1746 relevant references identified by our database searches, while 84 included references had been retrieved by other search methods. The growth of PubMed Central (PMC) and public access mandates have affected PubMed's composition. A previous study on the use of health information resources for patient care obtained 16,122 responses from health care providers in 56 hospitals about how providers make decisions affecting patient care and the role of information resources in that process. The recall of the database combinations was calculated over all included references retrieved by any database. Q. What are the best databases for a Nursing student to use? Google Scholar. See this image and copyright information in PMC. Once optimal recall is achieved, macros are used to translate the search syntaxes between databases, though manual adaptation of the thesaurus terms is still necessary. Our conclusion that Web of Science and Google Scholar are needed for completeness has not been shared by previous research. We estimate that 60% of published systematic reviews do not retrieve 95% of all available relevant references as many fail to search important databases. Because this is a novel finding, we cannot conclude whether it is due to our dataset or to a generalizable principle. But, it is complete in the sense that it goes back through the decades so that you can see how research on a topic has progressed. -, McKibbon KA, Fridsma DB. Using similar calculations, also shown in Table5, we estimated the probability that 100% of relevant references were retrieved is 23%. Syst Rev. 2015;68:61726. Wichor M. Bramer. Nearly 5,000 journals are read and their individual articles indexed and added to the MEDLINE database, which contains information about over 12 million journal articles. Finding one article on the subject and clicking on the "Related Articles" link to get a collection of similarly classified articles can expand a search that otherwise yields few results. To identify whether our searches had found the included references, and if so, from which database(s) that citation was retrieved, each included reference was located in the original corresponding EndNote library using the first author name combined with the publication year as a search term for each specific relevant publication. What is MEDLINE | IGI Global 2000 Oct;88(4):346-54. Medline (PubMed) is a research database covering all aspects of medical and biomedical research. Ask us here. Google Scholar. MEDLINE Home - National Library of Medicine A total of 292 (17%) references were found by only one database. In late 1971, an online version called MEDLINE ("MEDLARS Online") became available as a way to do online searching of MEDLARS from remote medical libraries. 2006 Jan;94(1):5560. Comput Biomed Res. Reviews included in the research. To learn more about PubMed, go to NLM's PubMed tutorial. Accessibility One user. It is laborious for searchers to translate a search strategy into multiple interfaces and search syntaxes, as field codes and proximity operators differ between interfaces. Some of the key features are highlighted in the following tabs. For each published systematic review, we extracted the references of the included studies. In 1957 the staff of the NLM started to plan the mechanization of the Index Medicus, prompted by a desire for a better way to manipulate all this information, not only for Index Medicus but also to produce subsidiary products. It may be that this will mark the beginning of a new era in medical bibliography. It was launched by the National Library of Medicine in 1964 and was the first large scale, computer based, retrospective search service available to the general public. Cite this article. We found that two databases previously not recommended as essential for systematic review searching, Web of Science and Google Scholar, were key to improving recall in the reviews we investigated. Starting with the most recent articles, we determined the databases searched either from the abstract or from the full text until we had data for 200 reviews. Here is a quick comparison of Google Scholar and Medline. Cookies policy. Ranking the whole MEDLINE database according to a large training set Search > 2.3 million conference abstracts. Because these studies based on retrospective analysis of database coverage do not account for the searchers abilities, the actual findings from the searches performed, and the indexing for particular articles, their conclusions lack immediate translatability into practice. MEDLINE is a great resource for medical research because it is authoritative, peer-reviewed, and complete (as much as possible, anyway). It is likely caused by difference in thesaurus terms that were added, but further analysis would be required to determine reasons for not finding the MEDLINE records in Embase. The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This study compares the usefulness of the MEDLINE and CINAHL databases for students on post-registration nursing courses We searched for nine topics, using title words only Identical searches of the two databases retrieved 1162 references, of which 88% were in MEDLINE, 33% in CINAHL and 20% in both sources The relevance of the references was assessed by student reviewers The positive . Moreover, in combinations where the number of results was greatly reduced, the recall of included references was lower. Whether Embase and Web of Science can be replaced by Scopus remains uncertain. Retrieval of entries using queries with keywords is useful for human users that need to obtain small selections. Title List: Started in the 1960s, it now provides more than 29 million references to biomedical and life sciences journal articles dating back to 1946. This search was used in earlier research [21]. Syst Rev 6, 245 (2017). NLM views each journal comprehensively, rather than basing a decision on a defined list of criteria. The calculation is shown in Table5. Searching for the best evidence. Part 2: searching CINAHL and Medline For the individual databases and combinations that were used in those reviews, we multiplied the frequency of occurrence in that set of 200 with the probability that the database or combination would lead to an acceptable recall (which we defined at 95%) that we had measured in our own data. 3 for the legend of the plots in Figs. Careers. Investigators and information specialists searching for relevant references for a systematic review (SR) are generally advised to search multiple databases and to use additional methods to be able to adequately identify all literature related to the topic of interest [1,2,3,4,5,6]. See Table1 for definitions of these measures. Embase. The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on a reasonable request. The Cochrane Handbook, for example, recommends the use of at least MEDLINE and Cochrane Central and, when available, Embase for identifying reports of randomized controlled trials [7]. Measuring use patterns of online journals and databases. CAS Nevertheless others have concluded that a single database is not sufficient to retrieve all references for systematic reviews [18, 19]. However, whether an article is present in a database may not translate to being found by a search in that database. If an included reference was not found in the EndNote file, we presumed the authors used an alternative method of identifying the reference (e.g., examining cited references, contacting prominent authors, or searching gray literature), and we did not include it in our analysis. 2010 Mar;27(1):210. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. PubMed Central Syst Rev. It's not complete in the sense that there is nothing left to add. Of all reviews in which we searched CINAHL and PsycINFO, respectively, for 6 and 9% of the reviews, unique references were found. Are MEDLINE searches sufficient for systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the diagnostic accuracy of depression screening tools? However, when looking at individual reviews, the probability of missing more than 5% of included references found through database searching is 33% when Google Scholar is used together with Embase and MEDLINE and 30% for the Web of Science, Embase, and MEDLINE combination. J Am Med Inform Assoc. See Fig. MEDLINE is a bibliographic database, meaning that it contains the reference information needed to find articles, but not the actual full-text articles. Also searchable with the PubMed interface are non-Medline citations, i.e. Of course, the loss of a minor non-randomized included study that follows the systematic reviews conclusions would not be as problematic as losing a major included randomized controlled trial with contradictory results. While the database itself is unfiltered, you can still use it to find filtered, evidence-based practice resources, including systematic reviews. For each review that we investigated, we determined what the recall was for all possible different database combinations of the most important databases. The database combinations with the highest recall did not reduce the total number of results by large margins. The references to these reviews can be found in Additional file 1. For citations added during 1995-2003: about 48% are for cited articles published in the U.S., about 88% are published in English, and about 76% have English abstracts written by authors of the articles. Librarian co-authors correlated with higher quality reported search strategies in general internal medicine systematic reviews. Exploring PubMed as a reliable resource for scholarly communications Evidence-Based Research: MEDLINE Search Help - Academic Guides at