Appraisal of: Petrova M, Sutcliffe P, Fulford KW, Dale J. Search terms and a validated brief search filter to retrieve publications on health-related values in Medline: A word frequency analysis study. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2012; 19(3): 479–488.
The aim of the article is to present search terms (keywords) and a “brief” search filter to identify information on health-related values in Medline developed by using word frequency analysis. The purpose of the project is to support broad-scoping searches by “a brief search filter (≤20 lines) of high precision (≥67%) and acceptable sensitivity (≥67%) which can be used […] in generic medical and health databases (e.g., Medline, Embase, or Cinahl) and across a range of topics (e.g., health conditions, health settings, health interactions, etc.)”.
The article provides extensive information on the background as on health-related values defined by the authors and on word frequency analyses. The application of this analysis in the conditions diabetes, dementia, schizophrenia and obesity resulted in a small overlap of relevant MeSH and free-text search terms (9 of 124 different MeSH terms (7.3%) and 4 of 144 different words (2.8%) were identified in all 4 conditions among the 50 “best” MeSH respective words in each condition). Applying the developed search filter in hypersensitivity and dentistry resulted in (authors defined) sensitivity of 70.1% (hypersensitivity) and 47.1% (dentistry), and precision of 63.6% (hypersensitivity) and 82.6% (dentistry).