Food for thought.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1472-6947-13-7.pdf
BMC Medical
Informatics and Decision Making 2013, 13:7 doi:10.1186/1472-6947-13-7
Background
In searches for
clinical trials and systematic reviews, it is said that Google Scholar (GS)should never be used
in isolation, but in addition to PubMed, Cochrane, and other trusted sources of
information. We therefore performed a study to assess the coverage of GS specifically for the
studies included in systematic reviews and evaluate if GS was sensitive enough to be used
alone for systematic reviews.
Methods
All the original
studies included in 29 systematic reviews published in the Cochrane database Syst Rev or in the
JAMA in 2009 were gathered in a gold standard database. GS was searched for all
these studies one by one to assess the percentage of studies which could have been identified by
searching only GS.
Results
All the 738 original
studies included in the gold standard database were retrieved in GS
(100%).
Conclusion
The coverage of GS
for the studies included in the systematic reviews is 100%. If the authors of the 29 systematic
reviews had used only GS, no reference would have been missed. With some improvement in
the research options, to increase its precision, GS could become the leading
bibliographic database in medicine and could be used alone for systematic
reviews.
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