• Viveka Alton, Ingemar Eckerlund, and Anders Norlund.
• Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care, Stockholm, Sweden. alton@sbu.se
• Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2006 Jan 1;22(4):512-7.

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to demonstrate the best way of identifying all relevant published health economic evaluation studies, which have increased in number rapidly in the past few decades. Nevertheless, health technology assessment projects are often faced with a scarcity of relevant studies.MethodsSix bibliographic databases were searched using various individually adapted strategies. The particular example involves the cost-effectiveness of diagnosing gastroesophageal reflux disease. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were formulated.ResultsAfter irrelevant studies and duplicates had been excluded, sixty-eight abstracts were reviewed. We chose forty-one of them as relevant for full-text review, which identified fourteen papers as having met the inclusion criteria. Most of the relevant studies were identified by searching the National Health Service Economic Evaluation Database (NHS EED) and PubMed databases.ConclusionsA search in NHS EED, by means of the Cochrane Library or the Center for Reviews and Dissimination, along with a supplementary search in PubMed, is generally an appropriate, cost-effective strategy. However, because "cost-effectiveness" is not consistently indexed with Medical Subject Heading terms in PubMed, all economic search terms need to be used to fully identify the relevant references.

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