Development and Validation of PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE Search Filters for Exposure Pathways Linking Climate Change With Public Health
Source: PubMed Central Open Access, NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine
ABSTRACT Introduction Climate change has major health impacts to which researchers and policymakers need to respond. The volume and multidisciplinary nature of climate‐health evidence pose challenges to its comprehensive identification. Search filters are currently not available for this topic. Our aim was to empirically develop sensitivity‐maximizing climate‐health search filters for two interfaces of the MEDLINE database. cesm70105-sec-0010 Methods Climate change impacts health via several exposure pathways involving distinct mechanisms: extreme weather events, heat stress, air quality, water quality and quantity, food supply and safety, vector distribution and ecology, and social factors. Using the relative recall method, we established a gold standard by extracting included studies of 110 evidence syntheses and classifying them into exposure pathways. From this set, we empirically derived and validated filters per pathway. cesm70105-sec-0020 Results Based on 1572 primary studies indexed in PubMed, we developed filters with a sensitivity of 95%, 97% and 99% for six of the seven major climate‐health exposure pathways. cesm70105-sec-0030 Conclusion We designed the first empirically derived search filters for climate‐health pathways, enabling sensitive retrieval despite acknowledged limitations. Our filters can be applied to different types of research questions at the intersection of climate and health. cesm70105-sec-0040 Key Messages The identification of evidence linking c
Abstract
ABSTRACT Introduction Climate change has major health impacts to which researchers and policymakers need to respond. The volume and multidisciplinary nature of climate‐health evidence pose challenges to its comprehensive identification. Search filters are currently not available for this topic. Our aim was to empirically develop sensitivity‐maximizing climate‐health search filters for two interfaces of the MEDLINE database. cesm70105-sec-0010 Methods Climate change impacts health via several exposure pathways involving distinct mechanisms: extreme weather events, heat stress, air quality, water quality and quantity, food supply and safety, vector distribution and ecology, and social factors. Using the relative recall method, we established a gold standard by extracting included studies of 110 evidence syntheses and classifying them into exposure pathways. From this set, we empirically derived and validated filters per pathway. cesm70105-sec-0020 Results Based on 1572 primary studies indexed in PubMed, we developed filters with a sensitivity of 95%, 97% and 99% for six of the seven major climate‐health exposure pathways. cesm70105-sec-0030 Conclusion We designed the first empirically derived search filters for climate‐health pathways, enabling sensitive retrieval despite acknowledged limitations. Our filters can be applied to different types of research questions at the intersection of climate and health. cesm70105-sec-0040 Key Messages The identification of evidence linking climate change with health in literature databases such as MEDLINE presents challenges and search filters are lacking for this topic. We present search filters with graded sensitivities for six of seven major climate‐health exposure pathways. The development of a filter for the pathway ‘social factors’ was not viable, suggesting that it requires other databases and complementary search methods. The search filters will help health information professionals and researchers to comprehensively identify relevant studies with a relationship to climate change. The filters can be applied to different types of research questions (interventions, associations, impacts, diseases, populations, regions) as they focus on major exposure pathways. bullet highlights