A practical guide to evaluating sensitivity of literature search strings for systematic reviews using relative recall.

ABSTRACT: Systematic searches of published literature are a vital component of systematic reviews. When search strings are not "sensitive," they may miss many relevant studies limiting, or even biasing, the range of evidence available for synthesis. Concerningly, conducting and reporting evaluations (validations) of the sensitivity of the used search strings is rare, according to our survey of published systematic reviews and protocols. Potential reasons may involve a lack of familiarity or inaccessibility of complex sensitivity evaluation approaches. We first clarify the main concepts and principles of search string evaluation. We then present a simple procedure for estimating a relative recall of a search string. It is based on a pre-defined set of "benchmark" publications. The relative recall, th

SUBMITTER: Lagisz M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12621535 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature