Development of a methodological PubMed search filter for finding studies on measurement properties of measurement instruments

By C. Terwee, E. Jansma, I. Riphagen, HC de Vet. Quality of Life Research, 2009

727 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ObjectivesFor the measurement of patient-reported outcomes, such as (health-related) quality of life, often many measurement instruments exist that intend to measure the same construct. To facilitate instrument selection, our aim was to develop a highly sensitive search filter for finding studies on measurement properties of measurement instruments in PubMed and a more precise search filter that needs less abstracts to be screened, but at a higher risk of missing relevant studies.MethodsA random sample of 10,000 PubMed records (01-01-1990 to 31-12-2006) was used as a gold standard. Studies on measurement properties were identified using an exclusion filter and hand searching. Search terms were selected from the relevant records in the gold standard as well as from 100 systematic reviews of measurement properties and combined based on sensitivity and precision. The performance of the filters was tested in the gold standard as well as in two validation sets, by calculating sensitivity, precision, specificity, and number needed to read.ResultsWe identified 116 studies on measurement properties in the gold standard. The sensitive search filter was able to retrieve 113 of these 116 studies (sensitivity 97.4%, precision 4.4%). The precise search filter had a sensitivity of 93.1% and a precision of 9.4%. Both filters performed very well in the validation sets.ConclusionThe use of these search filters will contribute to evidence-based selection of measurement instruments in all medical fields.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Pharmacology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3bc0c7364aad077c064267384d66c993ace89707

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Citations in the corpus

COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist for systematic reviews of Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (2017, methodology): “Other COSMIN tools were developed for other steps, such as a search filter for finding studies on measurement properties [13] and content validity methodology [8].”
COSMIN guideline for systematic reviews of patient-reported outcome measures (2018, methodology): “Regarding search terms for measurement properties we recommend to use a highly sensitive validated search filter for finding studies on measurement properties [27], which is available for PubMed and EMBASE, which can be found on the COSMIN website [8].”
ISOQOL recommends minimum standards for patient-reported outcome measures used in patient-centered outcomes and comparative effectiveness research (2013, methodology): “For the literature review, we adapted a published MEDLINE search strategy to identify measurement properties of PRO measures [16].”