Strategies to optimize MEDLINE and EMBASE search strategies for anesthesiology systematic reviews. An experimental study.

Background: A high-quality electronic search is essential for ensuring accuracy and comprehensiveness among the records retrieved when conducting systematic reviews. Therefore, we aimed to identify the most efficient method for searching in both MEDLINE (through PubMed) and EMBASE, covering search terms with variant spellings, direct and indirect orders, and associations with MeSH and EMTREE terms (or lack thereof).

Design And Setting: Experimental study.

Differences between the real and the desired worlds in the results of clinical trials.

Objective: We refer to the effectiveness (known as pragmatic or real world) and efficacy (known as explanatory or desired or ideal world) of interventions. However, these terms seem to be randomly chosen by investigators who design clinical trials and do not always reflect the true purpose of the study. A pragmatic-explanatory continuum indicator summary tool was thus developed with the aim of identifying the characteristics of clinical trials that distinguish between effectiveness and efficacy issues.

Choosing the right journal for your systematic review.

Rationale, Aims And Objectives: The importance of systematic reviews (SRs) as an aid to decision making in health care has led to an increasing interest in the development of this type of study. When selecting a target journal for publication, authors generally seek out higher impact factor journals. This study aimed to determine the percentage of scientific medical journals that publish SRs according to their impact factors (>2.

Testing search strategies for systematic reviews in the Medline literature database through PubMed.

Background: A high-quality electronic search is essential in ensuring accuracy and completeness in retrieved records for the conducting of a systematic review.

Objective: We analysed the available sample of search strategies to identify the best method for searching in Medline through PubMed, considering the use or not of parenthesis, double quotation marks, truncation and use of a simple search or search history.

Methods: In our cross-sectional study of search strategies, we selected and analysed the available searches performed during evidence-based medicine classes and in systematic reviews conducted in the Botucatu Medical School, UNESP, Brazil.

Intravenous versus inhalation anaesthesia for one-lung ventilation.

Background: This is an update of a Cochrane Review first published in The Cochrane Library, Issue 2, 2008.The technique called one-lung ventilation can confine bleeding or infection to one lung, prevent rupture of a lung cyst or, more commonly, facilitate surgical exposure of the unventilated lung. During one-lung ventilation, anaesthesia is maintained either by delivering an inhalation anaesthetic to the ventilated lung or by infusing an intravenous anaesthetic.