On 2016 Sep 19, Melissa Rethlefsen commented:

I applaud the authors' reporting of all of the search strategies behind this Cochrane review. There is, however, one area with a minor error. The MEDLINE search strategy for this review update is not reproducible, due to two causes: 1) no PRISMA-style flow chart to indicate the number of references found in either all or individual databases or in-text reporting of the complete number of references identified by searches before and after deduplication, and 2) a major Boolean error in the MEDLINE search strategy. For the second point, the MEDLINE search strategy is missing one or more lines that would combine the gynecological cancer terms together with the obstruction terms. It can be somewhat extrapolated from more complete search strategies reported for EMBASE and other databases, but because there is no flow chart, it is not clear if the extrapolated search is indeed what the authors performed. It appears as though the correct Boolean logic addition would be to combine lines 15 and 23, plus add the additional date limitation.

On 2016 Sep 19, Melissa Rethlefsen commented:

I applaud the authors' reporting of all of the search strategies behind this Cochrane review. There is, however, one area with a minor error. The MEDLINE search strategy for this review update is not reproducible, due to two causes: 1) no PRISMA-style flow chart to indicate the number of references found in either all or individual databases or in-text reporting of the complete number of references identified by searches before and after deduplication, and 2) a major Boolean error in the MEDLINE search strategy. For the second point, the MEDLINE search strategy is missing one or more lines that would combine the gynecological cancer terms together with the obstruction terms. It can be somewhat extrapolated from more complete search strategies reported for EMBASE and other databases, but because there is no flow chart, it is not clear if the extrapolated search is indeed what the authors performed. It appears as though the correct Boolean logic addition would be to combine lines 15 and 23, plus add the additional date limitation.