Question: what does effectiveness in literature searching mean?
Answer: it has no meaning to me.
It depends on what you are looking for, systematic literature review or “just” for clinical purposes
— R12
If you're doing a systematic review, you must find ALL studies…so you want high sensitivity but at the expense of low specificity
— R21
To me [it] is minimizing the time and resources needed to get the target articles to answer the question.
— R10
We can never know how many studies are available in the world literature to be found, so it is not very really possible to gauge effectiveness confidently.
— I4
This study aimed to address the question: what does “effectiveness” mean to researchers in the context of literature searching for systematic reviews? We conducted a thematic analysis of responses to an e-mail survey. Eighty-nine study authors, whose studies met inclusion in a recent review (2018), were contacted via e-mail and asked three questions; one directly asking the question: in literature searching, what does effective (or effectiveness in) literature searching mean to you? Thirty-eight (46%) responses were received from diverse professional groups, including: literature searchers, systematic reviewers, clinicians and researchers.
A shared understanding of what effectiveness means in literature searching was not identified. Instead, five themes were developed from data, namely: (a) effectiveness is described as a metric; (b) effectiveness is a balance between metrics; (c) effectiveness can be categorized by search purpose; (d) effectiveness is an outcome; and, (e) effectiveness is an experimental concept. We propose that these themes constitute a preliminary typology of understandings.
The paper is published here: https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1426