Article type
Year
Abstract
Objective: Using systematic reviews as one resource to inform health promotion and public health (HP&PH) policy can be challenging. HP&PH reviews are often difficult to locate within commercial and specialist registers. Searching difficulties will limit the acceptability and utility of reviews by HP&PH practitioners. Search strategies need to be sensitive, requiring a combination of free text and Major Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. The purpose of this study was to determine the ease with which one can locate HP&PH reviews within the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR).
Methods: A search of the CDSR (Issue 4, 2001) was conducted using 'health promotion' and 'public health' both as MeSH and free text keywords. The keyword fields of a sub-set of thirty-five randomly identified reviews were then scanned to determine if HP&PH was identified as either a MeSH term or free text keyword.
Results: A total of 487 reviews were identified. Screening the keyword field of 35 reviews indicated that only one review (3%) contained the term 'public health' as a MeSH term. No reviews were keyworded with 'public health' as a free text term, or with 'health promotion' as a MeSH or free text term.
Conclusions: Subsample analysis indicates that the keyword field of an estimated 3% of reviews on CDSR contain the MeSH terms 'public health' or 'health promotion'. No reviews contain these terms as free text keywords. This has implications for the ease with which policy makers, practitioners or researchers will be able to locate reviews on CDSR if using 'public health' or 'health promotion' as search terms. Future work could involve tagging reviews in CDSR with these simple keywords. This application of more specific yet intuitive topic identifiers to locate public health, health promotion and disease prevention interventions will assist policymakers practitioners, and researchers to use the CDSR to its full potential.
Methods: A search of the CDSR (Issue 4, 2001) was conducted using 'health promotion' and 'public health' both as MeSH and free text keywords. The keyword fields of a sub-set of thirty-five randomly identified reviews were then scanned to determine if HP&PH was identified as either a MeSH term or free text keyword.
Results: A total of 487 reviews were identified. Screening the keyword field of 35 reviews indicated that only one review (3%) contained the term 'public health' as a MeSH term. No reviews were keyworded with 'public health' as a free text term, or with 'health promotion' as a MeSH or free text term.
Conclusions: Subsample analysis indicates that the keyword field of an estimated 3% of reviews on CDSR contain the MeSH terms 'public health' or 'health promotion'. No reviews contain these terms as free text keywords. This has implications for the ease with which policy makers, practitioners or researchers will be able to locate reviews on CDSR if using 'public health' or 'health promotion' as search terms. Future work could involve tagging reviews in CDSR with these simple keywords. This application of more specific yet intuitive topic identifiers to locate public health, health promotion and disease prevention interventions will assist policymakers practitioners, and researchers to use the CDSR to its full potential.