Google Scholar Could Be Used as a Stand-Alone Resource for Systematic Reviews

Abstract

the terms of the Creative Commons-AttributionNoncommercial-Share Alike License 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the same or similar license to this one. AbstractObjective -To determine if Google Scholar (GS) is sensitive enough to be used as the sole search tool for systematic reviews. Design -Citation analysis.Setting -Biomedical literature.Subjects -Original studies included in 29 systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Library or JAMA.Methods -The authors searched MEDLINE for any systematic reviews published in the 2008 and 2009 issues of JAMA or in the July 8, 2009 issue of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. They chose 29 systematic reviews for the study and included these reviews in a gold standard database created specifically for this project. The authors searched GS for the title of each of the original references for the 29 reviews. They computed and noted the recall of GS for each reference.Main Results -The authors searched GS for 738 original studies with a 100% recall rate. They also made a side discovery of a number of major errors in the bibliographic references.