The EMTREE term "Diagnostic Test Accuracy Study" retrieved less than half of the diagnostic accuracy studies in EMBASE.

作者：Pema Gurung, S. Makineli, R. Spijker, M. Leeflang · 发表于：Journal of Clinical Epidemiology · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.06.030 · 被引用次数：10 · 研究领域：Medicine

OBJECTIVE Embase is a biomedical and pharmacological bibliographic database of published literature, produced by Elsevier. In 2011, Embase introduced the Emtree term "Diagnostic test accuracy study", after discussion with the diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) community of Cochrane. The aim of this study is to investigate the performance of this Emtree term when used to retrieve diagnostic accuracy studies. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING We first piloted a random selection of 1000 titles from Embase and then repeated the process with 1223 studies specifically limited to humans. Two researchers independently screened those for eligibility. From titles that were indicated as being relevant or potentially relevant by at least one assessor, the full texts were retrieved and screened. A third researcher retrieved the Emtree terms for each title and checked whether "Diagnostic Test Accuracy study" was one of the attached Emtree terms. The results of both exercises were then cross-classified and sensitivity and specificity of the Emtree term were estimated. RESULTS Our pilot set consisted of 1000 studies, of which 20 were studies from which DTA data could be extracted (2.0%). Thirteen studies had the label DTA study, of which five were indeed DTA studies. The final set consisted of 1223 studies, of which 33 were DTA studies (2.7%). Twenty studies were labelled as DTA study, of which fourteen indeed were DTA. This resulted in a sensitivity of 42.4% (95% CI 25.5% to 60.8%) and a specificity...