Abstract
To develop and validate a comprehensive search hedge for pharmacy education research to support efficient and precise evidence synthesis.
A title search for pharmacy education systematic reviews was undertaken to discover papers captured by a sensitive search hedge, defined as a pre-constructed set of database search terms designed to retrieve literature on a specific topic.
Primary studies were extracted from 7 high-quality reviews. These were used to build a corpus of 100 PubMed identifiers (PMIDs) for measuring relative recall. The hedge was adapted from terms previously created by a member of the author team and tested by the research team for maximum sensitivity.
The resulting PubMed search hedge was translated and re-validated for use in Embase via Elsevier, and MEDLINE via Ovid and EBSCO in June 2025. All searches attained 100% relative recall.
The use of relative recall methodology by a team of expert searchers led to a highly sensitive validated search hedge. The validated hedge can be trusted to identify relevant literature for pharmacy education researchers, while the approach may be adapted to other pharmacy research domains and health science disciplines.