The aim of the article is to present a procedure to identify information on ethical implications of the use and value-related decision-making in the assessment of health technologies. The purpose of the project is to develop, propose and test a step-by step workflow adapted to the specific issues of information on ethical issues (searching for arguments and qualitative data).

The article provides information on the background of developing the methodological approach as well as on the 8 working steps - Step 1 “Translation of the search question using the PICO scheme and additional components” to Step 8 “Final quality check and calculation of precision and recall”. The article is supplemented by the application results of the example “Ethical issues of autologous stem cell transplantation in metastatic breast cancer”.

The aim of the article is to present the systematic searching for Medical Ethics literature in the bibliographic databases BELIT (German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences, DRZE) and PubMed (National Library of Medicine, NLM) by means of two examples. The purpose of the project is to evaluate the feasibility and capacity of BELIT and PubMed as well as to design optimized search strategies for these two databases.

The article provides information on the selected databases, the search strategies designed for each source, and on the comparative analysis of the search results. Subjects of application are the examples “Concept of health and disease” and “Ethical, legal, social and economic issues of financing fertility treatments”.

In both examples the searches yielded in several hundred hits each with a small overlap of 3 and 4% between BELIT and PubMed. The best results are achieved by combining controlled terms and free-text queries. Using different query languages (German and English) in BELIT further improves the result. While in PubMed building of complex search strategies is possible, BELIT is restricted to process simple search queries.

The aim of the article is to present the development and structure of the project SIBIL (Sistema Informativo per la Bioetica In Linea) provided by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Rome, Italy. The purpose of the project is to collect, index and disseminate the Italian literature on bioethics since 1995.

The article provides information on the background of the database development, the development of the indexing system, the Italian Bioethics Thesaurus (TIB), and the presented publications. These are books, book contributions, journal articles, legal documents, ethical codes, statements, guidelines reports, grey literature, proceedings, electronic documents and resources. Further, information on conferences in bioethics is announced via the SIBIL web page (http://www.iss.it/sibi/index.php?lang=2).

This publication is in Italian. Abstract is provided in English.

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). 

The authors describe the methods they use to develop optimal search filters (hedges) to identify a range of study types: causation, prognosis, diagnosis, treatment, economics, clinical prediction guides, reviews, costs, and qualitative:  the filters were designed for MEDLINE and Embase. The authors built a large gold standard (reference set) by hand searching 170 journals for one year: 2000.  Relevant records were defined and were selected to represent best research methods. The gold standard records were then downloaded from  MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, and PsycINFO with the subject indexing assigned by each database.  Candidate search terms were identified from the gold standard records and consulting experts. The sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of unique search terms and combinations of search terms were calculated. Once the performance parameters of individual search terms were computed, the authors  selected individual terms for the construction of search strategies by choosing search terms with specific levels of sensitivity and specificity (which varied by database). The authors also used logistic regression to explore ways to improve filter performance. Strategies were developed in a random selection of 60% of the gold standard and validated in the remaining 40%. No statistical differences in performance were found between the two strategy development methods or between the test and validation results, so the majority of filter development used the Boolean approach and search strategies were developed using all records in the database.

The gold standard database numbered 60,330 records, each with up to 11 data fields. Filters were developed for studies of causation, prognosis, diagnosis, treatment, economics, clinical prediction guides, reviews, costs, and those of a qualitative nature.

This was a systematic review of HTA manuals and health economic guidelines focused on identifying search approaches and information sources to populate decision analytic models. 28 documents in English and German were identified. The overall messages from these guidelines were that searches should be as systematic as possible in terms of being transparent, but that only some model parameters, chiefly effects evidence, need by informed by systematic reviews. A large number of data sources of varying types may provide information for the parameters, but there seems to be little consensus about which are essential.

There are two online supplements. One lists excluded guidelines and the second provides some detail on each of the included guidelines.

This study explored methods to incorporate economic evaluations into Cochrane reviews, and part of the study involved searching NHS EED and HEED for economic studies. NHS EED and HEED searches were developed to identify relevant economic studies for 35 Cochrane reviews. The authors reported on database overlap and unique yield: 51 studies were unique to NHS EED and 9 to HEED. The authors recommend that searchers should use the strategies designed to find the review population (from the effects searches) when searching for burden of illness or cost of illness studies in NHS EED and HEED. If searching for economic evaluations, the intervention search strategy from the review is recommended. Searching both NHS EED and HEED is required to identify all potentially relevant economic evaluations, but only searches of HEED are required for other economic studies after changes to NHS EED in 2012.