On 2016 Dec 01, Amy Donahue commented:

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On 2016 Dec 01, Amy Donahue commented:

Using the information in this article for a presentation on assisted reproduction technology, it's very helpful. Appreciate that it's open access, too! But as a medical librarian, I couldn't help but note that the search strategy could be improved. Even excluding articles published after 8/1/16, this strategy retrieves more articles than the authors noted finding:

((("Oocytes"[Majr] OR oocyte*[tiab])) AND ("Cryopreservation"[Majr] OR freez*[tiab] OR "Vitrification"[Majr] OR vitrif*[tiab])) AND ("Pregnancy"[Mesh] OR pregnan*[tiab] OR survival[tiab] OR birth[tiab] OR "quality embryo"[tiab] OR "quality embryos"[tiab] OR "embryo quality"[tiab] OR "viable embryo"[tiab] OR "viable embryos"[tiab])

Not limiting to humans (which is helpful, but does limit to only Medline articles; maybe that was the authors' intent) yields roughly 1500; limiting to humans (which does exclude some human studies that just aren't indexed as such) brings it down to almost 1,000.

Additionally, searches should probably be done in other databases, not just PubMed (and note that Medline is the subset of articles in PubMed that are indexed with MeSH terms), for the sake of being comprehensive, although that certainly adds time and effort to screening and deduplicating the results (but librarians can also help with that). There should be librarians at some of the authors' institutions, if not all - getting some search help next time would make your work even stronger.

On 2016 Dec 01, Amy Donahue commented:

Using the information in this article for a presentation on assisted reproduction technology, it's very helpful. Appreciate that it's open access, too! But as a medical librarian, I couldn't help but note that the search strategy could be improved. Even excluding articles published after 8/1/16, this strategy retrieves more articles than the authors noted finding:

((("Oocytes"[Majr] OR oocyte*[tiab])) AND ("Cryopreservation"[Majr] OR freez*[tiab] OR "Vitrification"[Majr] OR vitrif*[tiab])) AND ("Pregnancy"[Mesh] OR pregnan*[tiab] OR survival[tiab] OR birth[tiab] OR "quality embryo"[tiab] OR "quality embryos"[tiab] OR "embryo quality"[tiab] OR "viable embryo"[tiab] OR "viable embryos"[tiab])

Not limiting to humans (which is helpful, but does limit to only Medline articles; maybe that was the authors' intent) yields roughly 1500; limiting to humans (which does exclude some human studies that just aren't indexed as such) brings it down to almost 1,000.

Additionally, searches should probably be done in other databases, not just PubMed (and note that Medline is the subset of articles in PubMed that are indexed with MeSH terms), for the sake of being comprehensive, although that certainly adds time and effort to screening and deduplicating the results (but librarians can also help with that). There should be librarians at some of the authors' institutions, if not all - getting some search help next time would make your work even stronger.