Allied and mental health practitioners searching the literature for clinical answers now can find clinical filters in Ovid CINAHL and PsycINFO. The filters are search strategies (known as “hedges”) that narrow search results to articles that are scientifically sound and clinically relevant. They were created by the researchers who devised similar filters for MEDLINE searching.
How the filters were created
The filters were developed by the Health Information Research Unit (HIRU) group at McMaster's University. The researchers read through 170 clinical journals for the year 2000, identifying articles that were scientifically sound and clinically relevant. These articles were grouped by the clinical issues they addressed: therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, etc.
The researchers then analyzed the MEDLINE database records for those articles and came up with search strategies that would retrieve these and similar articles when the database was searched. In some cases, the terms are subject headings -- in others, words or word stems from the abstracts, like “outcome” or “diagnos”.
The filters can be selected to skew for specificity or sensitivity, to retrieve either very targeted articles (at the risk of missing some useful articles) or a wider range of articles, including less relevant ones.
For the new filters, the researchers looked at the subset of the original journals that were indexed in each of the databases. Each filter is specific to the way the records appear in that database. One of the goals of the project is to encourage the database producers to develop indexing that better captures these useful records.
Available filters and levels of specificity/sensitivity:
Clinical filters are available for Ovid's MEDLINE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO, PubMed and MDConsult. Because CINAHL, PsycINFO and MDConsult include citations for materials other than journal articles, researchers can also identify dissertations and other materials that meet clinical needs.
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Database
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Filters
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Sensitivity options
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MEDLINE
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- therapy: an intervention for therapy (including adverse effects studies), prevention, rehabilitation, quality improvement, or continuing medical education.
- diagnosis: using a tool to arrive at a diagnosis of a disease or condition
- prognosis: prediction of the clinical course or the natural history of a disease or condition with the disease or condition existing at the beginning of the study
- clinical prediction guides: prediction of some aspect of a disease or condition
- qualitative: how patients feel or experience certain situations, and data collection methods and analyses are appropriate for qualitative data
- etiology: determining if there is an association between an exposure and a disease or condition. What causes people to get a disease or condition?
- costs: costs or financing or economics of a health care issue
- economics: economics of a health care issue (subset of cost articles)
- review: systematic reviews, meta-analyses. Unlike the other filters these are not clinical studies and are searched separately in PubMed clinical queries
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- sensitive: most relevant articles but probably some less relevant ones),
- specific: mostly relevant articles but probably omitting a few
- optimized: optimizes the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity
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CINAHL
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- etiology
- prognosis
- qualitative
- reviews
- treatment
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6 tiers:
- 1 term high sensitivity
- 1 term high specificity
- 1 term min difference
- 2 or more terms high sensitivity
- 2 or more terms high specificity
- 2 or more terms min difference
Min difference is similar to the MEDLINE “optimized”
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PsycINFO
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- qualitative
- reviews
- treatment
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- high sensitivity
- high specificity
- min difference
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PubMED
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- etiology
- diagnosis
- therapy
- prognosis
- clinical prediction guides
PubMed shows separate clinical queries for
- systematic reviews: systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, and guidelines..
- medical genetics with subcategories:
- diagnosis
- differential diagnosis
- clinical description
- management
- genetic counseling
- molecular genetics
- genetic testing
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narrow, specific search
broad, sensitive search
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MDConsult
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- diagnosis
- etiology
- therapy
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n/a
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How to use clinical filters
Each database has a different way of adding the filter to your search terms for a medical condition.
- Ovid databases
With Ovid databases, first perform a search for a medical condition. Then choose the More Limits feature. Select the Clinical Queries filter that addresses the clinical question you're trying to resolve, and the level of sensitivity you want.
- MDConsult
MDConsult has a feature that will limit results to different clinical focuses. It uses a proprietary strategy that is similar to the McMaster hedges. The books in MDConsults' database are indexed with MeSH terms, so they are included in these focused searches.
Enter a medical condition in the search box and use the Focus dropdown to restrict results.
For more information about clinical filters and search strategies, please contact the Reference desk at 215-503-8150, askalibrarian@jefferson.edu, or AIM: SMLreference.
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