Development of a subject search filter to find information relevant to palliative care in the general medical literature

Abstract

The study confirmed that literature relevant to palliative care is difficult to identify in general medical journals. While the filter developed in this research represents the best trade-off between sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and precision, the sensitivity is unacceptably low. Further research, such as frequency analysis of text-words and MeSH terms, is required to increase the sensitivity of searching in this subset of the literature.This project is generously sponsored by the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing