Alharbi, A. and Stevenson, R. orcid.org/0000-0002-9483-6006 (2020) Refining Boolean queries to identify relevant studies for systematic review updates. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27 (11). pp. 1658-1666. ISSN 1067-5027
Abstract
Objective Systematic reviews are important in health care but are expensive to produce and maintain. The authors explore the use of automated transformations of Boolean queries to improve the identification of relevant studies for updates to systematic reviews.
Materials and Methods A set of query transformations, including operator substitution, query expansion, and query reduction, were used to iteratively modify the Boolean query used for the original systematic review. The most effective transformation at each stage is identified using information about the studies included and excluded from the original review. A dataset consisting of 22 systematic reviews was used for evaluation. Updated queries were evaluated using the included and excluded studies from the updated version of the review. Recall and precision were used as evaluation measures.
Results The updated queries were more effective than the ones used for the original review, in terms of both precision and recall. The overall number of documents retrieved was reduced by more than half, while the number of relevant documents found increased by 10.3%.
Conclusions Identification of relevant studies for updates to systematic reviews can be carried out more effectively by using information about the included and excluded studies from the original review to produce improved Boolean queries. These updated queries reduce the overall number of documents retrieved while also increasing the number of relevant documents identified, thereby representing a considerable reduction in effort required by systematic reviewers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. This is an author-produced version of a paper subsequently published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Systematic reviews; screening; lexical statistics; query reformulation; Systematic reviews updates |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Computer Science (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 21 Jul 2020 11:45 |
Last Modified: | 02 Feb 2022 16:56 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/jamia/ocaa148 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:163518 |