An analysis of objective quality indicators on Year Book citations: implications for MEDLINE searchers.

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PURPOSE: This study is an analysis of Mosby Year Book citations from Ovid Online's Comprehensive Core Medical Library (CCML). The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to determine whether Year Book citations were more likely to be judged "key" than non-Year Book citations by clinicians; and (2) to determine whether the MEDLINE record of Year Book citations evaluated as key contained objective quality indicators that searchers might use to target key articles. BACKGROUND: As part of the MEDLINE/Full-Text Research Project, health care professionals evaluated search output from CCML on a five-point scale. The scale included the choice "key" for those items which the evaluator would not want to miss. Because the output contained items from the Year Book series, it was possible to determine whether the Year Book items were evaluated as key more frequently than expected. METHODS: This study analyzes the MEDLINE records corresponding to 110 references from the Mosby Year Book series evaluated as key by clinicians receiving search output from CCML. The records were examined for the presence of such searchable elements as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and publication types related to study design, evidence of research support, inclusion in the Abridged Index Medicus (AIM) subset, and a comments field. Also noted were the presence of a structured abstract, study design details in the author abstract, and inclusion in more than one Year Book. RESULTS: A chi-square test (p < .001 indicated that the proportion (33%) of Year Book citations marked key on the searches was significantly higher than that of non-Year Book citations (18%). When the occurrence of the searchable elements was compared to MEDLINE as a whole, the following access points appeared more frequently in the key Year Book records: study design terms categorized under epidemiologic methods in the MeSH Tree Structures; the checktag comparative study; AIM subset; comments field; and, publication types (pt) clinical trial, randomized controlled trial, multicenter study, and meta-analysis. CONCLUSIONS: These searchable elements should be helpful in targeting some, but not all, key articles in MEDLINE.

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