Development and validation of a geographical search filter to identify studies conducted in Germany

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dawid Pieper
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 471387773

There has been a growing interest and number in systematic reviews focusing on a particular region (e.g. state). However, searching for studies from a given state seems to be challenging as indicated by an analysis of systematic reviews intending to include only studies from Germany. The employed search strategies were not well elaboratedresulting in not retrieving relevant studies. Search filters are known as a helpful tool to facilitate efficient literature search. A geographic search filter for the retrieval of studies performed in Germany has not been previously published. The aim of the project is to develop and validate a geographic search filter to retrieve such studies in MEDLINE.The work program is based on suggested methods for the objective development and validation of search filters. It is divided into four parts. The first part starts with a set of relevant references (i.e. studies performed in Germany). This will be called the test set and is based up on some preliminary work. The test set builds the basis for theidentification of relevant search terms. Relevant search terms should have a high discriminative capacity. This means, that relevant search terms should be more prevalent in the test set than in whole MEDLINE. To test this, a population set is needed. The population set will be derived by randomly selecting references from MEDLINE. Textmining analysis will be applied in both sets to estimate prevalence of search terms. Depending on the results, search terms will be combined iteratively in different ways. The developed search filter will be validated against a set of independent references. The objectively developed and validated search filter will be compared with other search filter or search strategies to retrieve studies from Germany. Finally, the search filter will be adapted to the search Interface of OVID, and to the bibliographic database EMBASE.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Cooperation Partner: Julian Hirt