Protocol-Driven Searches for Medical and Health-Sciences Systematic Reviews

Citation

Bouamrane M, Macdonald C, Ounis I & Mair F (2011) Protocol-Driven Searches for Medical and Health-Sciences Systematic Reviews. In: Amati G & Crestani F (eds.) Advances in Information Retrieval Theory. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 6931. Third International Conference, ICTIR 2011, Bertinoro, Italy, 12.09.2011-14.09.2011. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 188-200. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23318-0_18

Abstract
Systematic reviews are instances of a critically important search task in medicine and health services research. Along with large and well conducted randomised control trials, they provide the highest levels of clinical evidence. We provide a brief overview of the methodologies used to conduct systematic reviews, and report on our recent experience of conducting a meta-review – i.e. a systematic review of reviews – of preoperative assessment. We discuss issues associated with the large manual effort currently necessary to conduct systematic reviews when using available search engines. We then suggest ways in which more dedicated and sophisticated information retrieval tools may enhance the efficiency of systematic searches and increase the recall of results. Finally, we discuss the development of tests collections for systematic reviews, to permit the development of enhanced search engines for this task.

Keywords
Protocol-Driven Searches; Medical and Health-Sciences Systematic Reviews; Faceted searches and information retrieval