Maintaining Literature Reviews & Editing Search Strategies – CAPTIS™ Features

“It’s all fun and games until you’re revising your Literature Search Strategy”

You’ve done literature reviews before and you’re confident you’ll nail this one too. Your research objectives are clear, with multiple search strategies in mind. You know which databases you’re targeting and are positive that your chosen date range will return enough relevant articles for you to write your report.

The first stop is PubMed. You run your search parameters, and satisfied with what you see, you extract the data into an excel sheet so that you can screen all your literature together later on. You run your next PubMed string(s), extract and save the results again.

Move to your next database. Rinse, and repeat.

You’ve now extracted data from all your search strings, the excel sheet looks proper, column headings are where you want them to be. Today has been productive.

However, midway through your screening you notice that you haven’t identified many relevant articles yet. And as you progress through the 2^nd half of the list, the status remains unchanged.

Your determination doesn’t falter, but reality soon sets in that you won’t have enough relevant articles for your report!

You must revisit your search strategy (and perform the laborious task of data extraction for ALL your strings, again). As your colleagues are wrapping up their workday, you stare hopelessly at Microsoft Excel, and wish for a miracle.

Typical symptoms of the I don’t want to do this again syndrome commonly seen in medical writers. Where junior writers and interns are the most vulnerable.

Assuming your original date range was from 01-Jan-2018 to 31-Dec-2021, this is what you will probably do:

1. Extend your search range by a couple of years: it now is 01-Jan-2015 to 31-Dec-2021
2. Search for the additional date range 01-Jan-2015 to 31-Dec-2017 for all the search strings, maintaining the same filters
3. Stitch the new results to your existing data set individually for each string

This should work, right? Unfortunately, not quite. In the pursuit of maintaining a continuous date range of 01-Jan-2015 to 31-Dec-2021 within your report, you will be faced with challenges when extending the search date range manually. Let’s take an example:

Looking at the example above, stitching individual date ranges together does not always give you the same results as a continuous date range. Presenting results from a stitched dataset as results from a continuous date range string is incorrect as you will not be able to replicate the same number of results when you run the continuous string. Repeatability is the core of a search strategy; hence, mismatched results would deem your search strategy inaccurate.

At Celegence, we understand operational challenges faced by device manufacturers and medical writers alike and use technology to overcome these challenges. Hence, we developed a user-friendly and intuitive search feature which allows users to edit their saved searches and reviewed articles without having to stitch multiple data sets together.

To search PubMed within the CAPTIS™ platform, enter the search parameters in the CAPTIS™ PubMed search module, hit Search and then Save the results. Apart from PubMed, users can also search within Google Scholar and Europe PMC directly via CAPTIS™.

A search when saved within the platform appears like this:

To edit a saved search, simply click on the search and you will be taken to the search edit page.

Make the necessary changes – in this case, let us expand the original date range of 01-Jan-2018 to 31-Dec-2021, to 01-Jan-2015 to 31-Dec-2021. CAPTIS™ now shows us the 849 results that PubMed gives us when running the continuous date range.

And what’s more, if your original data set was reviewed already, you can still go back and edit your searches and CAPTIS™ will present all the new articles under “Actions Pending”, so that your original reviewed dataset is unaffected.

To summarize, apart from developing the I don’t want to do this again syndrome, here are the key pain points and challenges with manually editing search strategies:

1. Manual work for medical writers to stitch the data back into the master data repository/dataset. This also involves a significant amount of pre-processing/formatting when combining differently formatted literature outputs from different databases.
2. Mismatched results: Stitching outputs from two date ranges for the same search string does not give you the same number of results as a continuous search. Another level of verification is needed to match the outputs from continuous date range.
3. Inaccurate search strategy: Presenting results from a stitched data set but presenting the same for a continuous date range in the report will deem your strategy inaccurate due to mismatched overall search results.

1. Hassle-free updates to the search strategy: The quest for evidence for a Clinical Evaluation Report, Performance Evaluation Report or any reports utilizing a literature output can be continued without worry with CAPTIS™ enabling you to add additional years to your date range with just a few clicks.
2. Easily extend date ranges: Users can simply update the date range of a saved search and CAPTIS™ will automatically pull all additional articles and present the results accurately as a continuous date range without any manual data-stitching.
3. Update saved searches but retain review decisions: Users can update saved searches even if the articles from the original searches have already been reviewed. New articles can be easily filtered out and reviewed.
4. Save Time with Smarter Report Maintenance: Combine the search editing features in CAPTIS™ to save time on the overall literature review for a maintenance report if you have overlapping date ranges. CAPTIS™ enables you to clone entire projects including the literature datasets and review decisions. Clone the previous projects, edit the date ranges of the previous search strings, retain review decisions of overlapping articles, and save time by reviewing only new articles.

Your medical writing team can benefit from CAPTIS™ with faster turnaround times for systematic literature reviews and more accurate end-to-end MDR/IVDR documentation support. To learn more and view a comprehensive demo of CAPTIS™, reach out to info@celegence.com today or contact us online to connect with a Celegence representative.