In the article “Applying Methodological Search Filters to CAB Abstracts to Identify Research for Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine” published in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) on pages 406 to 410, the data in Table 4 were calculated using the formula for precision rather than specificity. Specificity, as defined by Haynes et al., is defined as the total number of relevant but methodologically unsound articles not detected by the search filter divided by the total number of relevant, methodologically unsound articles in existence [1]. The corrected Table 4 is below. Specificity, using the corrected formula, was significant for search #3. This search contained terms designed to return results with the highest specificity.
Table 4 Specificity of modified evidence-based medicine search strategies or filters applied to the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and Veterinary Record
The author believes the Haynes study search strategies are still not practical for locating literature for evidence-based veterinary practice in the CAB Abstracts database. Overall, the low sensitivity and precision calculations reported in Tables 3 and 4 of the originally published study indicate clinicians must sort through a large number of irrelevant hits to identify literature for evidence-based veterinary medicine.
Reference
- Haynes RB, Wilczynski N, McKibbon KA, Walker C, and Sinclair JC. Developing optimal search strategies for detecting clinically sound studies in MEDLINE. J Med Inform Assoc. 1994 Nov–Dec; 1(6):447–58. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]