Age-specific search strategies for Medline

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Health Services Research

Background:

• Clinicians and researchers require age-specific literature, but Medline searches are challenging due to inconsistent indexing and overlapping age categories.
• Existing age-specific search strategies for Medline lack empirical testing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the retrieval performance of age-specific terms in Medline for five clinical specialties: adult, geriatric, pediatric, neonatal, and obstetrics medicine.
• To identify reliable search strategies for age-specific medical literature.

Main Methods:

• A manual hand search of 161 core healthcare journals from the year 2000 was conducted by trained research assistants.
• Age-specific search terms and phrases were compared against the hand-searched literature to determine sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy.
• Both single terms and combinations of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and textwords were analyzed.

Main Results:

• Combination terms achieved high sensitivity and specificity across disciplines, with optimal values for neonatal medicine at 92.5% sensitivity and 92.6% specificity.
• Pediatric medicine showed 98% sensitivity and 81.2% specificity, while obstetrics achieved 82% sensitivity and 97.1% specificity when maximizing sensitivity or specificity, respectively.
• Maximizing specificity generally decreased sensitivity but increased precision across all specialties.

Conclusions:

• Selected single terms and combinations of MeSH terms and textwords can reliably retrieve age-specific studies indexed in Medline.
• The validated search strategies enhance the discoverability of age-specific research for clinical practice and further investigation.