Validation of an interprofessional education search strategy in PubMed to optimize IPE literature searching

With exponential growth in the publication of interprofessional education (IPE) research studies, it has become more difficult to find relevant literature and stay abreast of the latest research. To address this gap, we developed, evaluated, and validated search strategies for IPE studies in PubMed, to improve future access to and synthesis of IPE research. These search strategies, or search hedges, provide comprehensive, validated sets of search terms for IPE publications.

The search strategies were created for PubMed using relative recall methodology. The research methods followed the guidance of previous search hedge and search filter validation studies in creating a gold standard set of relevant references using systematic reviews, having expert searchers identify and test search terms, and using relative recall calculations to validate the searches' performance against the gold standard set.

The three recommended search hedges for IPE studies presented had recall of 71.5%, 82.7%, and 95.1%; the first more focused for efficient literature searching, the last with high recall for comprehensive literature searching, and the remaining hedge as a middle ground between the other two options.

These validated search hedges can be used in PubMed to expedite finding relevant scholarships, staying up to date with IPE research, and conducting literature reviews and evidence syntheses.