A search strategy for occupational health intervention studies

Abstract

Background: As a result of low numbers and diversity in study type, occupational health intervention studies are not easy to locate in electronic literature databases. Aim: To develop a search strategy that facilitates finding occupational health intervention studies in Medline, both for researchers and practitioners. Methods: A gold standard of articles was created by going through two whole volumes of 19 biomedical journals, both occupational health specialty and non-occupational health journals. Criteria for occupational health intervention studies were: evaluating an intervention with an occupational health outcome and a study design with a control group. Each journal was searched independently by two of the authors. Search terms were developed by asking specialists and counting word frequencies in gold standard articles. Results: Out of 11 022 articles published we found 149 occupational health intervention studies.

Searching for high-quality articles about intervention studies in occupational health – what is really missed when using only the Medline database?

“…These findings were also observed in occupational medicine and toxicology (6,7). As a result, researchers are recommended to search multiple databases when performing comprehensive articles research, an approach that is standard practice for conducting meta-analysis.…”

Evidence-Based Practice Guidelines in OHS: Are They Agree-Able?

“…Clinical questions in occupational health practice are often not dealing with diseases but with risks, impairments, disabilities, return to work or lifestyle. For some of these issues, the developed clinical methods for evidence-based search strategies of the literature are insufficient and additional strategies for access to international and national databases have to be elaborated 12,13) . Another impediment to the application of evidence-based medicine (EBM), and consequently also for the development of practice guidelines, is the lack of research evidence in the field.…”

Knowledge Infrastructure Needed for Occupational Healtha

“…A number of projects was dealing with search strategies and is published already [12][13][14][15] . One project evaluated AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines for REsearch and Evaluation) as a quality assessment system for practice guidelines 16) .…”