Is the coverage of google scholar enough to be used alone for systematic reviews
By J. Gehanno, L. Rollin, S. Darmoni. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 2013
347 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundIn searches for clinical trials and systematic reviews, it is said that Google Scholar (GS) should never be used in isolation, but in addition to PubMed, Cochrane, and other trusted sources of information. We therefore performed a study to assess the coverage of GS specifically for the studies included in systematic reviews and evaluate if GS was sensitive enough to be used alone for systematic reviews.MethodsAll the original studies included in 29 systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Database Syst Rev or in the JAMA in 2009 were gathered in a gold standard database. GS was searched for all these studies one by one to assess the percentage of studies which could have been identified by searching only GS.ResultsAll the 738 original studies included in the gold standard database were retrieved in GS (100%).ConclusionThe coverage of GS for the studies included in the systematic reviews is 100%. If the authors of the 29 systematic reviews had used only GS, no reference would have been missed. With some improvement in the research options, to increase its precision, GS could become the leading bibliographic database in medicine and could be used alone for systematic reviews.
Subfields: History and Philosophy of Science, Safety Research, Statistics and Probability
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ca53bc17f2ddab46034e7119692a45df388462f
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In History and Philosophy of Science
In Safety Research
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Citations in the corpus
- Perceived usability evaluation of educational technology using the System Usability Scale (SUS): A systematic review (2021, background): “Even though Google Scholar is sensitive enough to be used alone for systematic reviews (Gehanno et al., 2013), further research is recommended by including other databases as well, in the following years.”
- The Role of Google Scholar in Evidence Reviews and Its Applicability to Grey Literature Searching (2015, background): “[11,12], but also as a replacement for traditional academic citation databases and in searches for grey literature in systematic reviews [13,14].”
- Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta‐analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources (2020, methodology): “(cid:129) This study provides a systematic evaluation and comparison of search and retrieval qualities of 28 widely used academic search systems, including Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science.”
- A review of Internet of Things for smart home: Challenges and solutions (2017, background): “Google Scholar has a M AN US CR IP T AC CE PT ED ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT high coverage for high quality studies, is highly sen itive and could be the first, and even more so a standalone choice for systematic reviews or meta-analysis (Gehanno et al., 2013).”