The University of Sofia, Bulgaria, disseminates local biomedical literature (1994 to present) through a free online database, ABS.  We systematically searched ABS to identify citations to controlled trials and find what proportion of these studies are to be found on MEDLINE.

We searched using Bulgarian and English phrases; manually selected citations of controlled trials and sought these citations on MEDLINE. Using the two languages we found a total of 628 unique citations, of which 47 of which seem to be relevant controlled trials (precision 7.48%, 13% of ABS citations were found on MEDLINE). The trials in ABS commonly focused on evaluation of care for people with cardiovascular or urological problems

Abhijnhan, A.

Surcheva, Z.

Wright, J.M.

Adams, C.E.

English

Entrance to main performance hall from main lobby off 5th Avenue S; wood paneling inset into the corten steel clad wall; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

James Dayton Design

MIT Libraries Dome

MacPhail Center for Music

North facade facing South 2nd Street; towers set back and clad in galvanized steel panels; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

West facade facing 5th Avenue S; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

White Rose Research Online

promoting access to White Rose research papers    White Rose Research Online   Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/    This is an author produced version of a paper published in Health Information and Libraries Journal.    White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3448/    Published paper  Abhijnhan, A., Surcheva, Z., Wright, J.M. and Adams, C.E. (2007) Searching a biomedical database from Bulgaria : the ABS database. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 24 (3). pp. 200-203. eprints@whiterose.ac.uk  1Searching a biomedical bibliographic database from Bulgaria: the ABS databaseAkhil AbhijnhanCochrane Schizophrenia Group, Academic Unit of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences,University of Leeds, 15 Hyde Terrace, Leeds, UKakhil.abith@gmail.comZhenya SurchevaCentral Medical Library, Medical University, Sofia, Bulgariajeny@sun.medun.acad.bgJudy WrightTrials Search Co-ordinator, Cochrane Schizophrenia Group, Academic Unit of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences, University of Leeds, 15 Hyde Terrace, Leeds, UKj.m.wright@leeds.ac.ukClive E AdamsCo-ordinating Editor, Cochrane Schizophrenia Group, Academic Unit of Psychiatry andBehavioural Sciences, University of Leeds, 15 Hyde Terrace, Leeds, UKc.e.adams@leeds.ac.ukCorrespondenceProfessor Clive E AdamsAcademic Unit of Psychiatry and Behavioural SciencesUniversity of Leeds15 Hyde TerraceLeedsUK LS2 9LTTel: +44 (0)113 343 2730Fax: +44 (0)113 343 2723E-mail: ceadams@cochrane-sz.org2Searching a biomedical bibliographic database from Bulgaria: the ABS databaseAbstractBackgroundThe University of Sofia, Bulgaria, disseminates local biomedical literature (1994 to present)through a free online database, ABS.ObjectivesTo systematically search ABS, identify citations to controlled trials and find what proportion ofthese studies are to be found on MEDLINE.MethodsWe searched using Bulgarian and English phrases; manually selected citations of controlled trialsand sought these citations on MEDLINE.ResultsUsing the two languages we found a total of 628 unique citations, of which 47 of which seem to berelevant controlled trials (precision 7.48%, 13% of ABS citations were found on MEDLINE). Thetrials in ABS commonly focused on evaluation of care for people with cardiovascular or urologicalproblems.DiscussionABS is another source of easily accessed trials not readily available elsewhere.3BackgroundThe Republic of Bulgaria, in south-eastern Europe, borders on Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro,Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. Its population of 7.3m, with a median age of 41 (UK -39), infantmortality 19.8 percentile (UK-5 percentile) and life expectancy at birth of 72.3 (UK-78.5). The majorlanguage is Bulgarian, of Cyrillic origin. It is a middle income country (GDP $71.54 billion – UK$1.83 trillion.) but since 1997 Bulgaria has been on the path to economic recovery. Its GDP isgrowing at a rate of 4–5% per year and it will join the EU in 2007. In Bulgaria medical staffs aretrained to a high standard, though hospitals and clinics may not have all the equipment andfacilities expected in richer nations. With positive changes in GDP it would be expected thatmedical research activities would also be increasing1.Wide dissemination of research, however, may lag behind its production. There is good evidencethat there are many relatively new databases, some of which have open access, containingcitations to research of wide general interest2 3. There is also the concern that the results of someof the types of studies may change their likelihood of being widely disseminated. For example,when Egger et al. searched German medical journals for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) andthen searched for other RCTs published in English from the same authors they found that qualitywas constant but that the size of the estimates of effect was not4. On average, these Germantrialists’ published studies with ‘positive’ results in English-language journals but studies with‘negative’ results or those showing no difference in the effect were more likely to be published inGerman-language journals—a phenomenon known as language bias.The Bulgarian database (ABS) is a public access, user-friendly biomedical bibliographic databaseand can be searched in English and Bulgarian5. It is produced by PC-TM Ltd. The main web link isnamed ABS but the label on the database webpage is AB-Catalogue. We will refer to thisdatabase as “ABS”. ABS offers easy access to the contents of over 130 ongoing and discontinuedBulgarian journals from 1994. It contains at least 18000 records of medical, pharmaceutical andchemical papers (relative proportions unspecified), 26000 citations to books, and 1400 citations toPhD Thesis publications. All records are indexed using the thesaurus of Index Medicus. Searchescan be carried out using ‘all words’ option or by selecting specific fields such as: title, author,keywords and ISBN. This study describes the formulation of a search strategy for ABS and thecomparison of the results of that search with records available in MEDLINE.ObjectivesTo search ABS, systematically identify citations to randomized controlled trials and investigate howmany of these are found and correctly indexed in MEDLINE.Methods4We identified the Bulgarian database ABS by searching Google on the Internet using the terms’Bulgarian’, ‘bibliographic’ and ‘medical’ 5. We ran simple searches in English and Bulgarian, usingthe ‘all words’ search option. This option searches the whole record including keywords. Thesearch results could be viewed as a list of titles, short references or full bibliographic references(including abstracts where available).We captured the full references. We took terms commonlyused to identify trials6 and employed ‘random%’ as a benchmark phrase against which all otherterms were compared (% is the wildcard symbol). The results of searches using additional phraseswere then compared with those of the phrase ‘random%’, duplicate records deleted and uniquereports of trials stored in an MS Access database. Our commercial bibliographic referencemanagement package could not store Cyrillic script. Records that seemed to meet the criteria forRCT or controlled clinical trial7 were then sought in MEDLINE and the ABS’s MeSH classificationrecorded.ResultsWe found ABS to be easy to use for relatively simple searches but it was problematic to exportand manage results. We chose ‘random%’ for our benchmark phrase as we felt it to be acceptableto a wide group of users but recognise that it is possible that the other phrases could have alsobeen of similar value.ABS contains records of randomised trials and most of what we identified can be found by runninga simple search (#2, Table 1.). Additional phrases do identify more studies but at the cost of muchloss of precision (#1, Table 1). In order to investigate whether, for at least RCTs, the contents ofMEDLINE eclipse that of ABS we sought each citation we had identified in ABS on MEDLINE(PubMed). Most of the RCTs we identified were not in MEDLINE (41/47, 87%). Of those that werein MEDLINE, only four were categorised as RCTs under the ‘Publication Type’.Searching with the native language term for random was fruitful, identifying papers not found usingEnglish terms with a high precision.The 47 trials we identified covered a range of topics from right across health care. Studies weremost frequently classified as focusing on cardiovascular problems (9/47) or urology (7/47)according to the existing MeSH classification. We are unsure, however, how this reflects the healthcare needs of Bulgaria.DiscussionBiomedical literature from Bulgaria, like that of other formerly communist states of Eastern Europe,is poorly represented in MEDLINE2 3. ABS is an easily accessible bibliographic database, availablefree of charge on the Internet. Since English language medical websites do not link directly to ABS5we used search engines to find it. Direct links are available from Bulgarian medical websites or viasearch engines (e.g. Google). It contains records of randomised trials most of which can be foundeven by those using only the English language, although search results are enhanced when usingnative language search terms. Those undertaking comprehensive searches for such papersshould consider this database as a source of further studies. At best, not to do so would leave theresults of their reviews less precise than could otherwise have been the case. At worst, not toconsider the increasing number of less well known biomedical bibliographic databases emergentfrom outside of the US and Europe, could lead to biased results8.6AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank Gill Rizzello for comments on the manuscript. This work contributed to thePRACTIHC project’s survey of randomized studies from low-middle income countries(http://www.practihc.org/).References1. Moll C, Gessler U, Bartsch S, El-Sayeh HG, Fenton M, Adams CE. Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and productivity of schizophrenia trials: an ecological study. BMC Psychiatry 2003;3:18.2. Kele I, Bereczki D, Furtado V, Wright J, Adams CE. Searching a biomedical bibliographicdatabase from Hungary--the 'Magyar Orvosi Bibliografia'. Health Info Libr J 2005; 22(4):293-5.3. Kumar A, Wright J, Adams CE. Searching a biomedical bibliographic database from theUkraine: the Panteleimon database. Health Info Libr J 2005; 22(3):223-7.4. Egger M, Zellweger-Zahner T, Schneider M, Junker C, Lengeler C, Antes G. Language biasin randomised controlled trials published in English and German. Lancet 1997;350(9074):326-9.5. PC-TM Ltd. ABS [Web Page]. 2006; Available at http://nt-cmb.medun.acad.bg/absw/abs.htm.(Accessed June 2006).6. Dickersin K, Manheimer E, Wieland S, Robinson KA, Lefebvre C, McDonald S. Developmentof the Cochrane Collaboration's CENTRAL Register of controlled clinical trials. Eval HealthProf 2002; 25(1):38-64.7. Higgins JPT GS. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions 4.2.5[updated May 2005]. In. The Cochrane Library, Issue 3, 2005. Chichester, UK: John Wiley &Sons, Ltd, 2006.8. Song F, Eastwood AJ, Gilbody S, Duley L, Sutton AJ. Publication and related biases. HealthTechnol Assess 2000; 4(10):1-115.7Table 1. Strategies and resultsSEARCH STRATEGY – search option Всички думи [all words] TotalrandomisedtrialsPrecisionTOTALRESULTS рандом% OR двойно% ORсляпо%OR  (клиничен% AND oпит%) OR опит% OR random% OR alloc% OR assign% OR double-blind% OR placebo% OR (clinical% ANDtrial%) OR trial%47 7.48% 628 рандом% OR двойно% ORсляпо%OR random% OR alloc% OR assign% OR double-blind% OR placebo%39 23.6% 165Benchmark term– search option Всички думи [all words] Randomisedtrialsidentified bybenchmarkrandom% 25 26% 98Other terms– search option Всички думи [all words] Unique RCTsnot alreadyidentified by‘random%’alloc% 2 10% 20assign% 2 6.% 33double-blind% 4 33% 12placebo% 2 18% 11clinical% AND trial% 2 0.34% 583trial% 3 2% 142 рандом%    [random%] 3 60% 5 двойно% OR сляпо% [double% OR blind%] 1 14.3% 7 Kлиничен% AND опит%  [clinical% AND trial%] 1 3.7% 27 oпит%    [trial%] 2 0.68% 293

Searching a biomedical database from Bulgaria : the ABS database

Lobby area looking out at class curtain wall facing 5th Avenue S; corten steel clad wall on the right; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

West facade facing 5th Avenue S, looking north towards old mills (left); In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

Interior, cafe area inside glass atrium of Science Mall, facing base of Glasgow Tower; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

Main lobby area off 5th Avenue S; corridor running past corten steel clad block on right, looking east; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

North facade facing South 2nd Street; towers set back and clad in galvanized steel panels, top of tower; In 2003, the organization changed its name to the MacPhail Center for Music; it is a private, non-profit music school first founded in 1907. The new facility one block south of the Mississippi riverfront was designed by James Dayton, who studied and worked with Gehry Partners. The six-story building, which opened in January of 2008, has 55 studios and several individual practice rooms; rooms for group classes; a two-story formal performance center with a green room and recording space; and an informal performance space for small recitals and impromptu gatherings. The building is fully ADA-compliant.  Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 7/22/2012

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Searching a biomedical database from Bulgaria : the ABS database

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