Imagining and validating a high-sensitivity pharmacy education hedge

ABSTRACT: OBJECTIVE: To develop, test, and validate a comprehensive search hedge for research regarding pharmacy education. METHODS: The hedge was originally inspired by an author’s LibGuide and modifications were co-created by a research team that imagined that the hedge could be improved to achieve maximum sensitivity. A title search for pharmacy education systematic reviews was undertaken to discover papers that should be captured by a sensitive search hedge. Review articles were screened in Covidence under dual review, with a tie-breaking third reviewer for conflicts. During screening, special attention was given to the search strategies each review employed. High-quality reviews were used to extract primary studies which built a corpus of 100 PMIDs, which were used to evaluate and measure the relative recall of the search hedge. RESULTS: 100% relative recall was achieved across PubMed/Medline, Ovid/Medline, EBSCO/Medline, and Elsevier/Embase. CONCLUSIONS: This hedge, after undergoing the validation process, can be trusted to yield highly relevant results for librarians and other researchers in the pharmacy education field.