Treed

 Snake skin! 



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Specificity versus sensitivity

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Today when I was helping a student with a search I was reminded again of the balancing act between specificity and sensitivity when one is searching. There is always the tradeoff between doing a sensitive search which, hopefully, finds all the extant evidence, and a specific search,minus noise, that’s finds the evidence. IMO it's best to strive for sensitivity knowing you can't know all of the variables that may impact your search. One limitation or missing term may affect one's search and therefore distort the evidence found and conclusion reached. And for that reason I have no problem with redundant and overlapping  terms in a search. This also makes me wary of proximity/adjacency searches versus simply ORing terms together. From:  https://bip.weizmann.ac.il/education/course/introbioinfo/03/lect6/sld001.htm
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PubPeer "Search" of the Week

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  We have a long way to go when a reviewer on PubPeer states a systematic review that does not include a search strategy is well done. And oddly enough.... this paper was not a systematic review, as the reviewer stated, but an RCT. A key step of the search is to query trial registries.  "Data Synthesis Out of the 5597 research protocols registered, only 727 were published (13.0%). The concordance rates of the primary outcomes were 48.7% and 72.6% in the abstract and main text, respectively. Conclusions This study revealed major discrepancies between the number of research protocols and published papers, and difference of description regarding the primary outcomes in published papers which were already defined in the research protocols."
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Bad Search Strategy

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Or how a librarian can  tell something is probably very wrong with your study almost immediately. For  some types of papers, like systematic reviews , a poor search is a huge red flag .   The dating app  equivalent of a mug shot for a profile pic. But can you  really  tell that much from a search? Yes, unlike  a lot of  evidence , such as photographs , the search is  fairly  easy to assess.  And yes, the results are affected when a research fails to include subject headings or uses the incorrect syntax. For a systematic review, an improper search run on too few databases = bad science. I'd create a running tally of bad searches, but I'd have to give up my day job. It's that bad. Western blots can  be fudged  and images stolen from elsewhere to doctor a study, but a search ... that can be rerun  immediately and checked. Not to mention  someone  like myself, I can spot a poor search at a glance. Most health sc...
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