Identifying Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Search Terminology: A Systematic Review of Health Systematic Reviews

Abstract

Research on the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations canprovide important information to address existing health inequalities. Finding existingresearch in LGBT health can prove challenging due to the plethora of terminology used. Wesought to describe existing search strategies and to identify more comprehensive LGBTsearch terminology. We iteratively created a search string to identify systematic reviewsand meta-analyses about LGBT health and implemented it in Embase, PubMed/MEDLINE,and PsycINFO databases on May 28--29, 2015. We hand-searched the journal LGBTHealth. Inclusion criteria were: systematic reviews and meta-analyses that addressedLGBT health, used systematic searching, and used independent coders for inclusion. Thepublished search terminology in each record and search strings provided by authors onrequest were cross-referenced with our original search to identify additional terminology.Our search process identified 19 systematic reviews meeting inclusion criteria. The numberof search terms used to identify LGBT-related records ranged from 1 to 31. From theincluded studies, we identified 46 new search terms related to LGBT health. We removedfive search terms as inappropriate and added five search terms used in the field. The resulting search string included 82 terms. There is room to improve the quality of searching andreporting in LGBT health systematic reviews. Future work should attempt to enhance thepositive predictive value of LGBT health searches. Our findings can assist LGBT healthreviewers in capturing the diversity of LGBT terminology when searching