• Journal of critical care · Aug 2013

    Capture-mark-recapture as a tool for estimating the number of articles available for systematic reviews in critical care medicine.

    • Daniel Lane, Mauricio Ferri, Henry T Stelfox, Jonathan Dykeman, and Charles H Goldsmith.
    • Department of Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada T2N 4Z6. dan.lane@ucalgary.ca
    • J Crit Care. 2013 Aug 1;28(4):469-75.

    IntroductionSystematic reviews are an important knowledge synthesis tool for critical care medicine clinicians and researchers. With new literature available each day, reviewers must balance identifying all relevant literature against timely synthesis. We therefore sought to apply capture-mark-recapture, a novel methodology, to estimate the population of articles available for a systematic review of effective patient rounding practices in critical care medicine.MethodsCapture-mark-recapture was applied retrospectively to estimate the population of articles available for a systematic review of 4 bibliographic databases. All research studies (no methodology restrictions) of patient rounding practices in critical care medicine were included. Estimates of article population size were calculated for search of the bibliographic databases, selection of articles for full-text review, and selection of articles for inclusion in the systematic review.ResultsCapture-mark-recapture estimated a population of 28839 articles (95% confidence interval [CI], 12393-70990) for search of the bibliographic databases, 169 articles (95% CI, 152-202) for full-text review, and 48 articles (95% CI, 39-131) for inclusion in the systematic review. These estimates suggest that our search identified 15% (4462/28839) of the population of potentially available articles for the search of the bibliographic databases, 79% (133/169) of articles for full-text review, and 79% (38/48) of articles for inclusion in the systematic review.ConclusionsThe capture-mark-recapture technique can be applied to systematic reviews in critical care medicine with heterogeneous study methodologies to estimate the population of articles available. Capture-mark-recapture may help clinicians who use systematic reviews to estimate search completeness and researchers who perform systematic reviews to develop more efficient literature search strategies.Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…

What will the 'Medical Journal of You' look like?

Start your free 21 day trial now.

We guarantee your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.