Development of a highly sensitive search strategy for the retrieval of reports of controlled trials using PubMed (original) (raw)

Failure to identify all possibly relevant reports of controlled trials for systematic review could result in bias. As part of the effort to identify all such reports, the Cochrane Collaboration has been using a 'highly sensitive search strategy' developed in 1993 for the retrieval of reports of controlled trials from MEDLINE. Many reviewers do not have access to fee-based versions of MEDLINE and will increasingly turn to the free web-based searching provided by PubMed as a means of identifying reports of controlled trials. Therefore, we set out to revise the original Cochrane strategy to develop a highly sensitive search strategy for the retrieval of reports of controlled trials from MEDLINE using PubMed.