Refining Boolean queries to identify relevant studies for systematic review updates.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Systematic reviews are important in health care but are expensive to produce and maintain. The authors explore the use of automated transformations of Boolean queries to improve the identification of relevant studies for updates to systematic reviews.

Materials and methods

A set of query transformations, including operator substitution, query expansion, and query reduction, were used to iteratively modify the Boolean query used for the original systematic review. The most effective transformation at each stage is identified using information about the studies included and excluded from the original review. A dataset consisting of 22 systematic reviews was used for evaluation. Updated queries were evaluated using the included and excluded studies from the updated ve

SUBMITTER: Alharbi A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7750994 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature