PRESS Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies: 2015 Guideline Statement.

By J. McGowan, M. Sampson, D. Salzwedel, E. Cogo, V. Foerster, Carol Lefebvre. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2016

4,309 citations recorded by the source corpus.

OBJECTIVE To develop an evidence-based guideline for Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) for systematic reviews (SRs), health technology assessments, and other evidence syntheses. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING An SR, Web-based survey of experts, and consensus development forum were undertaken to identify checklists that evaluated or validated electronic literature search strategies and to determine which of their elements related to search quality or errors. RESULTS Systematic review: No new search elements were identified for addition to the existing (2008-2010) PRESS 2015 Evidence-Based Checklist, and there was no evidence refuting any of its elements. Results suggested that structured PRESS could identify search errors and improve the selection of search terms. Web-based survey of experts: Most respondents felt that peer review should be undertaken after the MEDLINE search had been prepared but before it had been translated to other databases. Consensus development forum: Of the seven original PRESS elements, six were retained: translation of the research question; Boolean and proximity operators; subject headings; text word search; spelling, syntax and line numbers; and limits and filters. The seventh (skilled translation of the search strategy to additional databases) was removed, as there was consensus that this should be left to the discretion of searchers. An updated PRESS 2015 Guideline Statement was developed, which includes the following four documents: PRESS 2015 Evidence-Based Checklist, PRESS 2015 Recommendations for Librarian Practice, PRESS 2015 Implementation Strategies, and PRESS 2015 Guideline Assessment Form. CONCLUSION The PRESS 2015 Guideline Statement should help to guide and improve the peer review of electronic literature search strategies.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8e8b03ac9877d289ad345f849a5b4cb6defcea4

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Citations in the corpus

PRISMA-S: an extension to the PRISMA statement for reporting literature searches in systematic reviews (2021, methodology): “For Embase we used the filter for randomised trials proposed by the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network [104].””
Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta‐analyses in ecology and evolutionary biology: a PRISMA extension (2021, background): “While authors might deem it needlessly tedious to report the minutiae of their search methods, the supplementary information can service readers who wish to evaluate the appropriateness of the search methods (e.g. ‘PRESS’ – Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies; McGowan et al., 2016).”
The impact of patient, intervention, comparison, outcome (PICO) as a search strategy tool on literature search quality: a systematic review (2018, methodology): “As literature searching forms the underlying basis of systematic reviews, the quality of the literature search is crucially important to the overall quality of the systematic review [3].”
Cochrane Rapid Reviews Methods Group offers evidence-informed guidance to conduct rapid reviews (2020, positive): “Although Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies [30] is not part of current MECIR guidance, we recommend its use for Cochrane RRs. Evidence suggests that the absence of search strategy peer review often results in many missed studies not retrieved.”
Defining the process to literature searching in systematic reviews: a literature review of guidance and supporting studies (2018, background): “The PRESS checklist is the most prominent and it aims to develop evidence-based guidelines to peer review of electronic search strategies [5, 122, 123].”