Development and Validation of a Search Filter in PubMed MEDLINE for Immigrant Health Disparities

Description

Poster presented at the Medical Library Association annual conference in Chicago, IL, May 6, 2019.

Abstract

Objectives: This project is part of a larger series in which we aim to assess or create filters for health disparities. Our objective was to design and validate a search filter for PubMed MEDLINE to retrieve literature pertinent to immigrant health disparities. Methods: We solicited expert opinion to address ambiguities in existing definitions of health disparities and immigrant status. Expert feedback guided the creation of inclusion and exclusion criteria. We performed a generic topic search in PubMed and screened the results using the inclusion/exclusion criteria to identify records for the development set. Frequency analysis and hand-searching of the development set were used to generate terms for an immigrant health disparities filter. We hand searched relevant journals indexed in PubMed to establish the validation set of articles (the gold standard). This validation set was used to test the sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of the immigrant health disparities filter.

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