Searching for observational studies: what does citation tracking add to PubMed? A case study in depression and coronary heart disease

By H. Kuper, A. Nicholson, Harry Hemingway. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2006

2,930 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundPubMed is the most widely used method for searches of the medical literature, but fails to identify many relevant articles. Electronic citation tracking offers an alternative search method.MethodsArticles investigating the role of depression in the aetiology and prognosis of coronary heart disease were sought through two methods: a) PubMed, and b) citation tracking where Science Citation Index was searched for all articles which cited ("forward citation tracking") or were cited by ("backward citation tracking") any of the articles in an index review. The number and quality of eligible articles identified by the two methods were compared.Results50 articles that were not already included in the index review met our inclusion criteria; 11 were identified through Science Citation Index alone, 8 through PubMed alone, and 31 through both methods. Articles identified by Science Citation Index alone were published in higher impact factor journals, were larger and were less likely to show a positive association.ConclusionScience Citation Index identified more eligible articles than PubMed, and these differed qualitatively. Failing to use citation tracking in a systematic review of observational studies may result in bias.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec73170445d233bf781aef073423eefebc0da966

Citations in the corpus