Selecting papers for Review

Mateen FJ, Oh J, Tergas AI, Bhayani NH, Kamdar BB. Titles versus titles and abstracts for initial screening of articles for systematic reviews. Clin Epidemiol. 2013;5:89-95. 


BACKGROUND:There is no consensus on whether screening titles alone or titles and abstracts together is the preferable strategy for inclusion of articles in a systematic review.
METHODS:TWO METHODS OF SCREENING ARTICLES FOR INCLUSION IN A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW WERE COMPARED: titles first versus titles and abstracts simultaneously. Each citation found in MEDLINE or Embase was reviewed by two physician reviewers for prespecified criteria: the citation included (1) primary data; (2) the exposure of interest; and (3) the outcome of interest.
RESULTS:There were 2965 unique citations. The titles first strategy resulted in an immediate rejection of 2558 (86%) of the records after reading the title alone, requiring review of 239 titles and abstracts, and subsequently 176 full text articles. The simultaneous titles and abstracts review led to rejection of 2782 citations (94%) and review of 183 full text articles. Inter reviewer agreement to include an article for full text review using the titles-first screening strategy was 89%-94% (kappa = 0.54) and 96%-97% (kappa = 0.56) for titles and abstracts combined. The final systematic review included 13 articles, all of which were identified by both screening strategies (yield 100%, burden 114%). Precision was higher in the titles and abstracts method (7.1% versus 3.2%) but recall was the same (100% versus 100%), leading to a higher F-measure for the titles and abstracts approach (0.1327 versus 0.0619).
CONCLUSION: Screening via a titles-first approach may be more efficient than screening titles and abstracts together.


Meta analysis is the paper fodder pastime for people to get easy papers with next to no financial outlay. So you decide on a subject them analyse the publication databases using a few keywords and them get a list you then can read the papers and then decide which ones to base your analysis on and then write the paper. 


How do you decide which are the key papers? 

Read every thing...that would be too much work...Read the abstract...that is still a lot of work  or read the title of the paper?,

Whilst reading the abstracts is going to give you more info if you just read the titles you get enough idea if it is worth reading the abstract or the paper. 

So I wonder if you can guess which articles are selected for comments on the blog....Rule number 1 of paper writing...Make your titles informative! 

It is your shop window and if it doesn't sound interesting you are not going to looking inside.

Isn't this how we all decide to read when we are time limited, if there is not an interesting headline you may skip the story.

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