Background: Different international nonprofit organizations promote the development of evidence synthesis in different areas, such as Cochrane, the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence and the Campbell Collaboration, among others that are promoting the synthesis of quality information with the best available evidence for decision-making. For this, they have developed and worked on the elaboration of instances and didactic materials such as manuals and other standards that seek to contribute to the quality of the synthesis of evidence; among these materials are guides and manuals developed by experts in Cochrane and non-Cochrane search methods designed specifically for developing search methods. On the other hand, there are authors who, independently of these organizations, rely on guides such as Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses literature search extension (PRISMA-S) and Peer Review Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) to develop search strategies. In this proposal, we seek to explore and characterize how the authors of the evidence synthesis on climate change and health carry out their searches, what databases they use and the reporting methods.
Objectives: - Identify systematic reviews indexed in Medline (PubMed) published between 2022 and 2023 related to climate change and health effects. - Evaluate the reports of the search method of the selected reviews based on the criteria established in PRISMA-S. - Evaluate the search strategies reported with the PRESS guide.
Methods: We collected systematic reviews or scoping reviews published from 2022 to 2023 in the Medline (PubMed) databases related to climate change and Health, according to the categories defined by the World Health Organization. To select relevant terms, we use PubReMiner (https://hgserver2.amc.nl/cgi-bin/miner/miner2.cgi) and Analyze Medical Subject Headings (MeSH; mesh.med.yale.edu) We selected a representative sample of 10% from the results retrieved to analyze. The extracted data include those proposed in the PRESS and PRISMA-S.
Results: The preliminary results evaluated have detected deficiencies in the review search reports or inappropriate use of the PRESS and PRISMA-S guidelines.
Conclusions: The findings of our project will help to detect improvements in the quality of the development of search methods in this area of health that allows it to be an input to detect gaps and new areas of information.
Patient, public and/or healthcare consumer involvement: Evaluation patients or healthcare consumers were not involved in this study.