NHS evidence - kidney diseases and male urogenital disorders : search strategies for annual evidence updates

Conference item

NHS Evidence - kidney diseases and male urogenital disorders is one of 34 online specialist collections provided by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). This particular specialist collection is managed by a team from Oxford University Health Care Libraries. As part of our Service Level Agreement we are committed to producing three Annual Evidence Updates (AEUs) per year. AEUs are defined as “… the incidence of high-quality research evidence over a specific time period for a particular health condition, as well as national documents (for example, Department of Health or NHS) relevant to the specialist collection’s content development strategy”. In 2009 alone, we have presented one AEU on male urinary incontinence (January 2009), one on pre and post renal failure, proteinuria and glomerular filtration rate (May 2009) and the third AEU, launched in December 2009, was on post lymphoproliferative disorders in renal transplant patients. The aim of this paper is to describe the methodology used by our team to retrieve and filter evidence for our Annual Evidence Updates in a field where there are comparatively few systematic reviews published. For example, we have had to include evidence at the level of case series for our latest AEU and we snowballed our search results to include references cited in the recent eMedicine and UpToDate articles under the careful guidance of our clinical leads. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of following an evidence-based methodology when preparing the AEUs and on using the help and advice of a clinical lead. Examples of search methodologies will be discussed.

Authors: Bastin, E

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: European Association for Health Information and Libraries
• Host title: 12th European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries : Discovering new seas of knowledge : technologies, environments and users in the future of health libraries
• Publication date: 2010-01-01
• Edition: Publisher's version
• Event location: Lisbon, Portugal
• Language: English
• Keywords: search engine/methods; medical subject headings; evidence-based medicine; databases
• Subjects: Library & information science