The scientific community's response to COVID-19 has resulted in a large volume of research moving through the publication pipeline at extraordinary speed, with a median time from receipt to acceptance of 6 days for journal articles. Although the nature of this emergency warrants accelerated publishing, measures are required to safeguard the integrity of scientific evidence.

BackgroundStudies published in languages other than English are often neglected when research teams conduct systematic reviews. Literature on how to deal with non-English studies when conducting reviews have focused on the importance of including such studies, while less attention has been paid to the practical challenges of locating and assessing relevant non-English studies. We investigated the factors which might predict the inclusion of non-English studies in systematic reviews in the social sciences, to better understand how, when and why these are included/excluded.MethodsWe appraised all Campbell Collaboration systematic reviews (n = 123) published to July 2016, categorising each by its language inclusiveness. We sought additional information from review authors via a questionnaire and received responses concerning 47 reviews. Data were obtained for 17 factors and we explored correlations with the number of non-English studies in the reviews via statistical regression models. Additionally, we asked authors to identify factors that support or hinder the inclusion of non-English studies.ResultsOf 123 reviews, 108 did not explicitly exclude, and of these, 17 included non-English language studies. One factor correlated with the number of included non-English studies across all models: the number of countries in which the members of the review team work (B-value = 0.56; SE B = 0.24; 95% CI = 0.07–1.03; p = 0.02). This indicates that reviews which included non-English studies were more likely to be produced by international review teams.Our survey showed a dominance of researchers from English-speaking countries (52.9%) and review teams consisting only of team members from these countries (65.9%). The most frequently mentioned challenge to including non-English studies was a lack of resources (funding and time) followed by a lack of language resources (e.g. professional translators).ConclusionOur findings may indicate a connection between the limited inclusion of non-English studies and a lack of resources, which forces review teams to rely on their limited language skills rather than the support of professional translators. If unaddressed, review teams risk ignoring key data and introduce bias in otherwise high-quality reviews. However, the validity and interpretation of our findings should be further assessed if we are to tackle the challenges of dealing with non-English studies.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13643-018-0786-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Background Since it was declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, COVID-19 has dominated headlines around the world and researchers have generated thousands of scientific articles about the disease. The fast speed of publication has challenged researchers and other stakeholders to keep up with the volume of published articles. To search the literature effectively, researchers use databases such as PubMed. Objective The aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of different searches for COVID-19 records in PubMed and to assess the complexity of searches required. Methods We tested PubMed searches for COVID-19 to identify which search string performed best according to standard metrics (sensitivity, precision, and F-score). We evaluated the performance of 8 different searches in PubMed during the first 10 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate how complex a search string is needed. We also tested omitting hyphens and space characters as well as applying quotation marks. Results The two most comprehensive search strings combining several free-text and indexed search terms performed best in terms of sensitivity (98.4%/98.7%) and F-score (96.5%/95.7%), but the single-term search COVID-19 performed best in terms of precision (95.3%) and well in terms of sensitivity (94.4%) and F-score (94.8%). The term Wuhan virus performed the worst: 7.7% for sensitivity, 78.1% for precision, and 14.0% for F-score. We found that deleting a hyphen or space character could omit a substantial number of records, especially when searching with SARS-CoV-2 as a single term. Conclusions Comprehensive search strings combining free-text and indexed search terms performed better than single-term searches in PubMed, but not by a large margin compared to the single term COVID-19. For everyday searches, certain single-term searches that are entered correctly are probably sufficient, whereas more comprehensive searches should be used for systematic reviews. Still, we suggest additional measures that the US National Library of Medicine could take to support all PubMed users in searching the COVID-19 literature.

Education is essential in insulin pump therapy, but literature in the field is limited. We systematically reviewed insulin pump education programmes and their effects in two situations as follows: (1) basic education at the start of insulin pump therapy, providing the study design enabled us to separate the effects of insulin pump therapy itself from the effects of education and (2) re‐education of experienced pump users. Population: individuals ≥16 years with type 1 diabetes using insulin pumps with or without continuous glucose monitoring. Systematic searches were run in MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL and ERIC. Original studies reporting an effect of insulin pump education programmes were included if published in English between January 1999 and May 2019. Of 988 potentially relevant studies, 48 were assessed in full text. Nine studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria, including one randomised controlled trial. Educational approaches and settings were sparsely described in all studies, and the content was usually reported as teaching points. Two studies considered basic education, reporting evaluations of knowledge and application skills, and programme satisfaction. The remaining seven studies referred to re‐education. Two studies measured severe hypoglycaemic events before and after a re‐education intervention, both reporting a significant event reduction. HbA1c decreased significantly in three of four studies. Two studies reported increased knowledge and improved application skills. In conclusion, this review indicates benefits from basic education and from re‐education. The strength of the conclusions is limited by the low number of studies and study designs. High‐quality studies are needed comparing different approaches for insulin pump education.

BACKGROUND The ability to efficiently search the scientific literature is crucial during a pandemic. OBJECTIVE To measure the performance of different searches in PubMed. METHODS We tested PubMed searches for COVID-19 to identify which search strategy performed best according to standard metrics. We evaluated the performance of eight different searches in PubMed during the first ten weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate how complex a search string is needed. We also tested omitting hyphens and space characters as well as applying quotation marks. RESULTS The two most comprehensive search strings performed best, but the single-term search, COVID-19, performed well in terms of sensitivity (98.4/98.7 vs 94.4), positive predictive value (94.6/92.7 vs 95.3), and F-score (96.5/95.7 vs 94.8). We found that deleting a hyphen or space character could omit a substantial number of records. If entered correctly, a single-term search performed well although the number of relevant records would be increased by using a comprehensive search. CONCLUSIONS Expert search terms performed better than single term searches in PubMed, but not by a large margin. For day to day searches single term searches are probably fine whereas for systematic reviews more comprehensive searches should be used.