抄録
In recent years, medical treatment based on scientific evidence has increased in importance. The use of MEDLINE as a method of discovering such evidence is relevant because anyone can freely access MEDLINE via the World Wide Web (WWW).
Unfortunately, few strategies to search for evidence by using MEDLINE interface (PubMed) have so far been reported in the literature. We therefore examined two PubMed search strategies to identify adverse reactions as follows : Method 1, which inputs the name of drugs and adverse effects, and Method 2, which inputs the name of drugs and adverse effects, including “adverse effects” and “etiology”.
As a result, about 40% of all the literature identified by method 1 were noise. However, such noise decreased to about 20% with method 2. However, Method 2 could not identify some of the relevant literature available by Method 1. In order to search effectively for relevant literature, it is necessary to know the limitations of the search strategies.
