The information problem in women's health: a piece of the solution

Researchers and practitioners in the women's health field frequently express difficulty in locating information about sex and gender differences in medicine. This study hypothesized that a major reason for this is that when sex and gender differences are reported in the literature, they are not indexed in a way that facilitates locating the information. Search strategies were devised for the MEDLINE database to create three bibliographies related to women in each of six clinical areas. At one end of the spectrum, the strategy maximized precision (a high number of articles found were relevant). At the other end, recall was maximized (a high number of the known relevant articles were found). One intermediate strategy was formulated in an attempt to find the best combination. Precision and recall were measured for each strategy by performing the searches (18 total) and then randomly selecting 10 retrieved references. First, the abstracts were judged for relevance. Whenever it was not clear from the abstract that the article was relevant, women in the field of women's health evaluated the original article. The criterion for relevance was provision of clinically useful information about the health of women. The results show that it is possible to devise an efficient MEDLINE strategy to retrieve on average 64% of articles reporting sex or gender differences. This is consistent with the results of other studies of retrieval in MEDLINE. Strategies for effective searching are recommended.