In current practice, this involves extensive searching through bibliographic databases, such as MEDLINE or EMBASE, of medical papers - or, more often, citations (article abstracts plus metadata) - using complex Boolean queries. Most such reviews are produced by a team of experts, such as senior medical researchers, and the work often takes the team a number of person-months or even -years.Ī large part of the effort that goes into a systematic review is the identification of literature relevant to a given clinical question. Some recent example research topics, from the Cochrane collaboration, include "Acupuncture for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and adolescents", "Balloon angioplasty versus medical therapy for hypertensive patients with renal artery obstruction", and "N-acetylcysteine for sepsis and systemic inflammatory response in adults".Īuthoring a systematic review involves an intensive laborious process, typically involving: reading of upwards of a thousand abstracts locating and reading of hundreds or more full papers and assembling these into a structured document suitable for researchers and clinicians. These reviews are a summary, evaluation, and analysis of the results of published studies such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in relation to a highly focused medical question. Systematic reviews of biomedical literature are a key input into evidence-based clinical practice whereby increasingly it is expected that medical decisions be determined by published evidence. Outcomes of experiments suggest that an interactive query-development process using a hybrid ranked and Boolean retrieval system has the potential for significant time-savings over the current search process in the systematic reviewing. However, we describe a refinement of the standard Boolean search process and show that ranking within a Boolean result set can improve the overall search performance by providing early indication of the quality of the results, thereby speeding up the iterative query-refinement process. Our results show that ranked retrieval by itself is not viable for this search task requiring high recall. We conduct a series of experiments involving ranked retrieval, using queries defined methodologically, in an effort to understand the practicalities of incorporating ranked retrieval into the systematic search task. We explore the effectiveness of using ranked retrieval as compared to Boolean querying for the purpose of constructing a systematic review. Further, our experience is that effective Boolean queries for this specific task are extremely difficult to formulate and typically require multiple iterations of refinement before being finalized. The standard paradigm for this information-seeking task is to use Boolean search however, this leaves the user(s) the requirement of examining every returned result. The process of constructing a systematic review, a document that compiles the published evidence pertaining to a specified medical topic, is intensely time-consuming, often taking a team of researchers over a year, with the identification of relevant published research comprising a substantial portion of the effort.
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