Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: in 2019, the USA appears as the country with the most publications indexed in the Web of Science, almost double those in China and four times those in Germany. In Latin America, Brazil is the country with the greatest number of documents published in the Web of Science, ranking 13th in the world. Therefore, it is not surprising that, when searches for articles for any systematic review are carried out, final results are mostly from these countries. Whether or not this is a reality, we believe that an important part of research carried out in countries that do not rank in the above reference lists, is invisible.
Objective: to describe the difficulties and lessons learned in searching articles for a systematic review, 'Suicide mortality in adults from countries in Latin America'.
Methods: based on the results of searches according to MOOSE, in the following databases: VHL, EBSCOhost, Embase, LILACS, PubMed, ProQuest, PsycNET, ScienceDirect, SciELO, Scopus and WoS, to identify the studies related to factors associated with mortality due to suicide in adults in Latin America, we reached a final list of 60 articles. We specified in which database these were identified and in which database they were indexed, and contrasted these results for each article and database (see Figure 1).
Results: 98.4% of the identified articles are indexed in some of the databases, but only 80.3% of these were identified by means of search strategies. We did not find 13.3% of the articles in any database, although they were indexed in some, they were only found by cross-reference search. Furthermore, 86.7% of the articles were duplicated in at least two databases and 78.3% in at least three databases. When we performed a specific analysis for each database used for this search; the percentages of coincidence between the number of articles actually found, and the number of articles that should have been found, none exceeded 89% efficiency; reaching a final result of only 15.4% in Embase.
Conclusions: independent of the search strategies, which could be criticized despite rigorous construction, the difficulty in identifying the articles is definitely noteworthy. The above is a possible indicator that investigative efforts become invisible, and as such do not reach their ultimate goal of applicability and generalization. It is clear that this research only refers to a specific systematic review and it would be optimal to be able to replicate this analysis in other systematic reviews. We believe it is fundamental to encourage researchers to use multiple databases in their searches, as well as the revision of cross references.
Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: anyone who performs a bibliographic search with key terms to identify the associated research.
Objective: to describe the difficulties and lessons learned in searching articles for a systematic review, 'Suicide mortality in adults from countries in Latin America'.
Methods: based on the results of searches according to MOOSE, in the following databases: VHL, EBSCOhost, Embase, LILACS, PubMed, ProQuest, PsycNET, ScienceDirect, SciELO, Scopus and WoS, to identify the studies related to factors associated with mortality due to suicide in adults in Latin America, we reached a final list of 60 articles. We specified in which database these were identified and in which database they were indexed, and contrasted these results for each article and database (see Figure 1).
Results: 98.4% of the identified articles are indexed in some of the databases, but only 80.3% of these were identified by means of search strategies. We did not find 13.3% of the articles in any database, although they were indexed in some, they were only found by cross-reference search. Furthermore, 86.7% of the articles were duplicated in at least two databases and 78.3% in at least three databases. When we performed a specific analysis for each database used for this search; the percentages of coincidence between the number of articles actually found, and the number of articles that should have been found, none exceeded 89% efficiency; reaching a final result of only 15.4% in Embase.
Conclusions: independent of the search strategies, which could be criticized despite rigorous construction, the difficulty in identifying the articles is definitely noteworthy. The above is a possible indicator that investigative efforts become invisible, and as such do not reach their ultimate goal of applicability and generalization. It is clear that this research only refers to a specific systematic review and it would be optimal to be able to replicate this analysis in other systematic reviews. We believe it is fundamental to encourage researchers to use multiple databases in their searches, as well as the revision of cross references.
Patient or healthcare consumer involvement: anyone who performs a bibliographic search with key terms to identify the associated research.
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