Searching for health equity: validation of a search filter for ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in transport

Abstract

Background Efforts to improve health equity should be informed by the best available evidence. However, equity-related research is inconsistently indexed, and uses a variety of terms to describe key concepts, making it difficult to reliably identify all relevant studies. We report the development and validation of a search strategy for studies investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status, using the field of transport and health as an example. Methods Adapting previously described methods, we followed four steps: generation of a test set of eligible studies, search strategy development, search strategy validation, and documentation. Results Drawing from 12 systematic reviews, supplemented by additional studies identified by experts and colleagues, we identified a test set of 11 studies that met our eligibility criteria. We assigned five studies to a development set, which we used to develop and refine our search strategy. We assigned the remaining six studies to a validation set, against which we tested our final search strategy. The final search strategy identified all studies in both validation and development sets. Conclusions The validated search strategy derived in this study facilitates the conduct of systematic reviews and other literature searches investigating whether the effects of interventions differ by ethnicity or socio-economic status and may be further developed in future for other equity-focused searches and reviews.

Methodological guidance for incorporating equity when informing rapid-policy and guideline development

“…Review authors should also ensure that search terms capturing equity-related content have been included within the search string. Authors should aim to adopt validated filters relevant to their topic when searching for studies that are equity relevant [ [65] , [66] , [67] , [68] ]. If there are no validated filters, authors should be mindful that unvalidated equity filters could limit their searches and risk missing relevant evidence.…”

Climate Change Mitigation Policies and Co-Impacts on Indigenous Health: A Scoping Review

“…An initial limited search of these databases was conducted, followed by an analysis of text words contained in the title and abstract of identified articles, and of the index terms used. We used these keywords and index terms to develop customized search strategies for each of the databases, based on a validated search strategy for equity-focused reviews [43]. A sample search strategy is provided in Appendix A.…”

Identifying priorities for research on financial risk protection to achieve universal health coverage: a scoping overview of reviews

“…We used pretested search filters to identify review articles 31. The search terms included controlled vocabulary and keywords for the concepts of (1) UHC, (2) FRP and (3) equity or impoverishment 32. We used a broad set of synonyms for each concept, as, for example, UHC-related terms have evolved over time and usage has varied between HIC (‘universal healthcare’) and LMIC (‘UHC’) 10 12.…”

“…31 The search terms included controlled vocabulary and keywords for the concepts of (1) UHC, (2) FRP and (3) equity or impoverishment. 32 We used a broad set of synonyms for each concept, as, for example, UHC-related terms have evolved over time and usage has varied between HIC ('universal healthcare') and LMIC ('UHC'). 10 12 To capture possible variation in FRP definitions, search concepts were combined using the following logic: (UHC AND FRP) OR (UHC AND equity).…”