Developing Validated Search Strategies to Find Interprofessional Education Studies in PubMed​

Background: As there is exponential growth in the publication of interprofessional education (IPE) research studies, it has become more difficult to quickly find relevant papers and stay abreast of all the latest research. To address this, this poster presents the methods and results of a formal search hedge validation study that provides recommended search terms for IPE studies. Specifically, this poster addresses the development, evaluation, and validation of search hedges for IPE studies in PubMed, to improve future access to and synthesis of IPE research. The comprehensive, validated sets of search terms provide expert guidance to make it easier for educators and researchers to find IPE publications. Design: The search hedges were created for PubMed using relative recall methodology; the research process followed the guidance of previous search hedge and search filter validation research in creating a gold standard set of relevant references from papers included in high quality IPE systematic reviews and then testing the search terms against this reference set using relative recall to validate the search hedges' sensitivity. In this gold standard set there are 267 papers that were included in 15 systematic reviews. The IPE search hedges were created using combinations of keywords and MeSH terms, with each term tested for search performance and the searches peer reviewed by a librarian and by an IPE subject expert. Results: There were two best performing hedges: one with lower sensitivity and high precision, best for efficient literature searching, and one with high recall and lower precision, for comprehensive literature searching. The first, narrower search hedge is better suited for quick information retrieval while the second, broader search hedge is better for literature reviews and evidence syntheses. ​Conclusion and Implications: These validated sets of search terms will make it easier for scholars to find relevant IPE research and more efficiently apply it to their research and practice.