Description of trials and systematic reviews exclusively retrieved by LILACS

Tags: Poster
Ciapponi A1, Glujovsky D1, Comande D1, Bardach A1
1Institute for Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy (IECS-CONICET)

Background:

In a previous study, we found an overlap between LILACS and PubMed from 2006 to 2015. Out of all the articles identified, we found 1612 (0.3%) trials (RCTs) and 3578 (0.9%) systematic reviews (SRs) were retrieved exclusively by LILACS (Table 1).

Objectives:

To describe the medical specialist category subject of RCTs and SRs exclusively retrieved by LILACS, in order to decide the topics for which searching of this database is most warranted.

Methods:

We performed a search on PubMed and LILACS to identify SRs and trials published between 2006 and 2015. We excluded later years to avoid incomplete indexation.

We selected search terms for both databases to favour their comparability (Box 1). We classified each reference by the 47 subject categories under the SCImago Medicine subject area.2

Results:

Out of the 466 potential SRs about interventions that we found, only 152 (32%) were actually SRs about interventions. The subjects that were mostly addressed were orthopedics and sports medicine (17.7%), obstetrics and gynecology (9.7%), psychiatry and mental health (5.3%), and surgery (5.3%). When we analysed the RCTs, we found that 28 (22%) out of the 128 were eligible. The subjects that were mostly addressed were cardiology and cardiovascular medicine (23.1%), oral health (19.2%), infectious diseases (11.5%), and surgery (11.5%).

Conclusions:

Although there are not too many RCTs and SRs exclusively retrieved by LILACS, searching in this database could be important in some specific specialties.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: Healthcare consumers participated in this study as reviewers.