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Nowadays, a multitude of scientific publications on health science are being developed that require correct bibliographic search in order to avoid the use and inclusion of retracted literature in them. The use of these articles could directly affect the consistency of the scientific studies and could affect clinical practice. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the capacity of the main scientific literature search engines, both general (Gooogle Scholar) and scientific (PubMed, EMBASE, SCOPUS, and Web of Science), used in health sciences in order to check their ability to detect and warn users of retracted articles in the searches carried out. The sample of retracted articles was obtained from RetractionWatch. The results showed that although Google Scholar was the search engine with the highest capacity to retrieve selected articles, it was the least effective, compared with scientific search engines, at providing information on the retraction of articles. The use of different scientific search engines to retrieve as many scientific articles as possible, as well as never using only a generic search engine, is highly recommended. This will reduce the possibility of including retracted articles and will avoid affecting the reliability of the scientific studies carried out.

PubMed is a free database used daily by about 2.5 million people to search and retrieve scientific documents related to Health Sciences. In May 2020, certain changes were made to its search algorithm, which at first sight improves the location of scientific articles, but upon analyzing its operation in more depth, we detected some changes that make the reproducibility of bibliographic searches difficult. In order to safeguard the reproducibility and replicability of the searches carried out for systematic reviews, narratives and meta-analyzes, we suggest accompanying these strategies with a file in a format compatible with reference managers, to facilitate comparison and verification of the strategy to be replicated in a future.

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Sílvia Sastre-Suárez es licenciada en documentación y diplomada en biblioteconomía y documentación por la Universitat de Barcelona. ResumenContinuamente aparecen nuevos sistemas de recuperación de la información (buscadores, metabuscadores, bases de datos, etc.), pero el trabajo diario de los profesionales de la documentación deja poco tiempo para su evaluación. Ello trae consigo que en numerosas ocasiones se utilicen e incluso recomienden algunos de los que no se conocen realmente sus funciones y la adecuación de su algoritmo de búsqueda. Por ello se realizó un análisis para conocer mejor las especificidades de los buscadores especializados en ciencias de la salud accesibles gratuitamente a través de internet, para cerciorarnos de su calidad y saber cuáles ofrecen mejores resultados. Palabras claveRecursos electrónicos, Evaluación de recursos, Metabuscadores, Sistemas avanzados de recuperación de la información. Title: Evaluation of free metasearch engines specialized in health sciences AbstractAlthough new information retrieval systems (search engines, metasearch engines, databases, etc.) continually appear, the daily work of information professionals leaves little time to evaluate them. As a result, on numerous occasions a system is used, and even recommended, without knowledge of its functions and the adequacy of its search algorithm. An analysis was conducted to better understand the specifics of the search engines specialized in health sciences freely accessible via the internet, to assess for quality and determine which ones offer the best results.