Laetitia Rollin

Is the coverage of google scholar enough to be used alone for systematic reviews

BackgroundIn 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.MethodsAll 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.ResultsAll the 738 original studies included in the gold standard database were retrieved in GS (100%).ConclusionThe 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.

Research on return to work in European Union countries

BACKGROUND Research on return to work (RTW) is increasing. It is important to benefit from studies originating from different countries since certain factors influencing the RTW process are specific to each country. AIMS To compare RTW research in Europe with the USA and to describe research on RTW in Europe. METHODS Medline was scanned with specific search strings to identify studies concerning RTW in Europe, in the USA and in the rest of the world. Characteristics of the European studies were analyzed with two specific tools for bibliometrics research. RESULTS Four thousand five hundred and twenty-five studies were identified (1100, 1005 and 2420 coming from Europe, the USA and the rest of the world, respectively). The European countries producing the greatest number of research papers standardized for population of that country were Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark. Sweden was 5.7 times more prolific than the USA. Specialties covered by the European publications included occupational medicine (the subject of 66% of the articles), neurology (36%), environment and public health (32%), physical medicine and rehabilitation (26%) and rheumatology (24%). CONCLUSIONS There is a worldwide trend upwards in the number of publications on RTW. Europe recently overtook the USA in the number of publications per head of population, although there were large differences in publication rates among the European countries. The publications of European researchers on RTW are spread over a wide variety of journals, making access to this research difficult.

Improving information retrieval with multiple health terminologies in a quality-controlled gateway.

BackgroundThe Catalog and Index of French-language Health Internet resources (CISMeF) is a quality-controlled health gateway, primarily for Web resources in French (n=89,751). Recently, we achieved a major improvement in the structure of the catalogue by setting-up multiple terminologies, based on twelve health terminologies available in French, to overcome the potential weakness of the MeSH thesaurus, which is the main and pivotal terminology we use for indexing and retrieval since 1995. The main aim of this study was to estimate the added-value of exploiting several terminologies and their semantic relationships to improve Web resource indexing and retrieval in CISMeF, in order to provide additional health resources which meet the users’ expectations.MethodsTwelve terminologies were integrated into the CISMeF information system to set up multiple-terminologies indexing and retrieval. The same sets of thirty queries were run: (i) by exploiting the hierarchical structure of the MeSH, and (ii) by exploiting the additional twelve terminologies and their semantic links. The two search modes were evaluated and compared.ResultsThe overall coverage of the multiple-terminologies search mode was improved by comparison to the coverage of using the MeSH (16,283 vs. 14,159) (+15%). These additional findings were estimated at 56.6% relevant results, 24.7% intermediate results and 18.7% irrelevant.ConclusionThe multiple-terminologies approach improved information retrieval. These results suggest that integrating additional health terminologies was able to improve recall. Since performing the study, 21 other terminologies have been added which should enable us to make broader studies in multiple-terminologies information retrieval.

How is occupational medicine represented in the major journals in general medicine

Objectives Most physicians have received only limited training in occupational medicine (OM) during their studies. Since they rely mainly on one ‘general medical’ journal to keep their medical knowledge up to date, it is worthwhile questioning the importance of OM in these journals. The aim of this study was to measure the relative weight of OM in the major journals of general medicine and to compare the journals. Methods The 14 091 articles published in the Lancet, the NEJM, the JAMA and the BMJ in 1997, 2002 and 2007 were analysed. The relative weight of OM and the other medical specialties was determined by categorisation of all the articles, using a categorisation algorithm, which inferred the medical specialties relevant to each MEDLINE article file from the major medical subject headings (MeSH) terms used by the indexers of the US National Library of Medicine to describe each article. Results The 14 091 articles included in this study were indexed by 22 155 major MeSH terms, which were categorised into 73 different medical specialties. Only 0.48% of the articles had OM as a main topic. OM ranked 44th among the 73 specialties, with limited differences between the four journals studied. There was no clear trend over the 10-year period. Conclusions The importance of OM is very low in the four major journals of general and internal medicine, and we can consider that physicians get a very limited view of the evolution of knowledge in OM.

Influenza vaccination coverage among health professionals before and after the A(H1N1) influenza pandemic in France.

To the Editor—We read with interest the study by Guthmann et al on influenza vaccination coverage 1 year after the A(H1N1) influenza pandemic in France. The authors conducted a phone survey among a representative sample of households in mainland France. The sample included 198 healthcare workers (HCWs), and vaccination coverage in this group was 27.6%. On the basis of the fact that a previous study performed with a similar methodology showed vaccination coverage of 33.9% among HCWs, the authors concluded that the controversies related to the pandemic vaccination campaign of 2009-2010 have not had a negative impact on subsequent seasonal influenza vaccination coverage. Being occupational physicians in a university hospital, we did not have this feeling, and we therefore performed a short survey among various hospitals in France. We sent a questionnaire concerning influenza vaccination coverage of health professionals to 150 occupational physicians working in different hospitals in France. We received 30 answers, mosdy from university hospitals, representing more than 150,000 health professionals (Table 1). Briefly, all hospitals but one reported a sharp decrease, ranging between —21% and —61%, in vaccination coverage between the winter of 2008-2009, before the A(H1N1) pandemic, and the winter of 2010-2011, after the A(H1N1) pandemic. The mean decrease in vaccination coverage was 42% and was highly significant (P<.001). Since the answers were provided by occupational health physicians who recorded only the vaccinations performed in the occupational health departments, coverage might be un-

Influence of author's affiliation and funding sources on the results of cohort studies on occupational cancer.

BACKGROUND Reliability and credibility of research conducted by industry have been questioned, including in the field of occupational health. METHODS Cohort studies on occupational cancer published between 2000 and 2010 were compared according to their results, their conclusions, their funding, and the affiliation of their authors. RESULTS Overall, 510 articles were included. Studies published by authors with public affiliation or funded by public grants concluded that their study showed an excess of cancer more frequently (P = 0.01) than studies published by authors with private affiliation or funded by private grants (88% [95%CI = 85-91] vs. 73% [95%CI = 56-88] and 92% [95%CI = 86-97] vs. 71% [95%CI = 57-84], respectively). Discrepancies between statistical results and conclusion occurred more frequently in articles written by authors from the private sector than from the public sector (42% [IC95% = 26-60] vs. 23% [IC95% = 18-26], P = 0.02). CONCLUSIONS Industry affiliations of authors or industry support of studies are associated with the results of published studies on occupational cancer. The underlying mechanisms warrant further investigation.

Incidence of tuberculosis among nurses and healthcare assistants in France.

BACKGROUND Health care workers (HCWs) are considered to be at higher risk of tuberculosis (TB) than the general population. However, a decreasing incidence in the general population as well as improvement in preventive measures in hospitals has reduced the risk for HCWs. AIMS To quantify the actual incidence of TB in nurses and health care assistants in a low-incidence country. METHODS We performed a retrospective study of 80 hospitals throughout France, employing 233389 health care staff (physicians excluded). We calculated the number of pulmonary TB cases over 3 years (700166 person-years) and the total number of staff members in each job category (nurses, health care assistants, administrative staff) in each hospital, to calculate the incidence. RESULTS Overall, the incidence rate varied between 1.27 and 6/100000 for administrative staff and nurses, respectively (non-significant difference). The incidence varied according to the geographical area. However, the incidence in nurses and health care assistants was not different from the general population (7.5/100000). CONCLUSIONS In a low-incidence country, such as France, the implementation of measures to prevent occupational TB among HCWs has been effective. These preventive measures should be maintained but medical follow-up could be revised.

Prevalence of Overweight andEating Disorder Risk of HospitalNight Staff at Rouen UniversityHospital

Introduction: Night shift work can disturb the biological rhythm of employees and can lead to sleep digestive and nutritional disorders as well as onset of overweight. We studied the prevalence of nutritional disorders among the night shift staff of a university hospital. Methods: Staff were proposed an anonymous questionnaire including items on: socio-demographics, physical activity, nutrition (BMI, snacking, hyperphagia, weight change with duration of night shift and screening risk of eating disorder (ED) with F-SCOFF questionnaire); sleepiness (EPWORTH questionnaire); and smoking status. Results: Four hundred and nineteen (57.4%) night shift workers answered the questionnaire. More 90% were women and nearly half of them were nurses (47%). One hundred and forty-six (36.6%) had weight excess and 15.8% (n=66) were suspected to have an ED. One out of five workers (16.9%, n=70) had an EPWORTH score in with risk of hypersomnia. Multivariable logistic regression analysis found factors significantly associated with suspected ED: high EPWORTH score (aOR=3.94, 95% CI [1.91, 8.13]), weight gain in night staff (aOR=3.40, 95% CI [1.60, 7.21]), overweight (aOR=2.04, 95% CI [1.06-3.94]), dieting (aOR=3.38, 95% CI [1.74, 6.55]), and hyperphagia (aOR=3.74, 95% CI [1.55, 9.00]). At least one third of workers were interested in dietary counseling (n=38.2%). Conclusion: Overweight and ED are frequent in night shift workers, which underlines the need for specialized intervention.

Searching for rare diseases in PubMed: a blind comparison of Orphanet expert query and query based on terminological knowledge

BackgroundDespite international initiatives like Orphanet, it remains difficult to find up-to-date information about rare diseases. The aim of this study is to propose an exhaustive set of queries for PubMed based on terminological knowledge and to evaluate it versus the queries based on expertise provided by the most frequently used resource in Europe: Orphanet.MethodsFour rare disease terminologies (MeSH, OMIM, HPO and HRDO) were manually mapped to each other permitting the automatic creation of expended terminological queries for rare diseases. For 30 rare diseases, 30 citations retrieved by Orphanet expert query and/or query based on terminological knowledge were assessed for relevance by two independent reviewers unaware of the query’s origin. An adjudication procedure was used to resolve any discrepancy. Precision, relative recall and F-measure were all computed.ResultsFor each Orphanet rare disease (n = 8982), there was a corresponding terminological query, in contrast with only 2284 queries provided by Orphanet. Only 553 citations were evaluated due to queries with 0 or only a few hits. There were no significant differences between the Orpha query and terminological query in terms of precision, respectively 0.61 vs 0.52 (p = 0.13). Nevertheless, terminological queries retrieved more citations more often than Orpha queries (0.57 vs. 0.33; p = 0.01). Interestingly, Orpha queries seemed to retrieve older citations than terminological queries (p < 0.0001).ConclusionThe terminological queries proposed in this study are now currently available for all rare diseases. They may be a useful tool for both precision or recall oriented literature search.