The Cochrane Primary Health Care Field is currently conducting a study to construct and validate a search strategy for the retrieval of articles relevant to Primary Care, General Practice, or Family Medicine in the PubMed database. We are looking to find a search string that facilitates a researcher's or GP's use of evidence-based medicine in their work.
In order to do that, we are collecting articles from different countries and time periods, and including them in a 'gold standard'. By doing that, we can include all terms that different countries use for 'general practice' across different years from the 1960s onwards. We will test different search terms against this gold standard and hopefully construct a string with satisfactory sensitivity and specificity.
What we request from you is to send us some references to articles that you think are important for general practice and that you think a good search strategy should be able to retrieve. We are especially interested in 'old' studies: i.e. studies published before 1990. Feel free to cite yourselves!
We have created inclusion criteria for articles that will be in our true positives:
Inclusion Criteria For Primary Care Articles:
1. Experimental studies that were conducted in the primary care setting or concerning interventions specifically designed for use in general practice.
2. Case-control studies done in the primary care setting or performed by general practitioners (GPs).
3. Cross-sectional Studies investigating the incidence and prevalence of conditions in patients presenting to a GP.
4. (Dynamic) Cohort studies conducted using general practice patients.
5. Diagnostic studies done in the primary care setting using diagnostic tests designed for use in general practice.
6. Systematic reviews that evaluate the types of articles listed above.
7. Editorials written by GPs or whose main topic is general practice.
Please send your references to info@cochraneprimarycare.org
Thank you in advance for your time and effort.
Cochrane Primary Health Care Field.