Search Strategies: Prognosis
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Overview of Search Strategies

Quick Search Strategy
Quality Search Strategy

Quick Search Strategy: When looking for articles about the eventual outcome of a disease after various treatments, type in your search terms; combine the separate lines with AND or OR, and then apply one of the following:

Best one-term strategy:

• Use cohort studies as a Keyword  search string.

Maximum sensitivity strategy:

• Use incidence as a Title Word search term or
• Use mortality as a Keyword  search term, or
• Use follow up studies as a Keyword  search term, or
• Use prognos$ as a Title Word search term, or
• Use predict$ as a Title Word search term, or
• Use course as a Title Word search term.

Maximum specificity strategy:

• Use prognosis as a Title Word search term. or
• Use survival analysis as a Keyword  search term.

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Quality Search Strategy:   The following "hedge", or standardized search strategy, creates a large set of high validity articles on prognosis. It may take several minutes to run on Medline.   Note: $ is the truncation symbol on OVID databases.

1. (prognos$ or outcome$ or follow-up or predict$).ti,ab,sh.
2. exp disease progression
3. ((natural$ or disease$) adj (progress$ or course$ or histor$)).ti,ab,sh.
4. 1 or 2 or 3 (where mortality is a possible outcome, increase the search's sensitivity by adding the term mortality/ or survival analysis/ at this point using the Boolean operator "OR")
5. exp cohort studies
6. (cohort$ or compar$ or longitudinal$ or prospective$ or multivariate or reproducib$). ti,ab,sh.
7. 5 or 6
8. 4 and 7

After entering the hedge, you can search by target disease or disorder.  For maximum sensitivity, use "all subheadings".  For more specificity, use one or more of the following subheadings:   

• Classification (CL)
• Complications (CO)
• Diagnosis (DI)
• Epidemiology (EP)
• Etiology (ET)
• Mortality (MO)
• Physiopathology (PP)

After entering the search terms, combine the result with the set generated by the hedge using the Boolean operator "AND".

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