The Clinical Study Categories option is meant to be used by busy clinicians in order to assist them with retrieving clinically relevant, methodologically sound studies that they can use to inform their clinical decision-making. The five categories (or methodological study types) available include: 1) Etiology, 2) Diagnosis, 3) Therapy (which is the default selection), 4) Prognosis, and 5) Clinical prediction guides. Users can also filter their results by scope: a search strategy can be limited to either a broader, more sensitive search that will return a larger number of results or to a narrower, more specific search that will return fewer results that are more precise.  These Clinical Study Categories search filters or “canned searches” are based on the research of Dr. RB Haynes and his bioinformatics colleagues from McMaster University in Canada, and have been updated and re-validated over the years.

Basically how the search filters work is that a searcher begins by typing in his/her search terms for their topic and running the search strategy in PubMed. Once some citations are displayed, the interface allows the user to apply the study type and scope filters, essentially asking the PubMed search interface to add additional search terms to the search strategy. These added terms, often referred to as a “canned search” or a “search hedge”, have been tested and validated and have been found to be optimal search terms for pushing the search in a particular direction, as specified by the searcher via his/her filter selections. For example, if a searcher selects “Diagnosis” as their question type, then terminology related to the strength of a diagnostic test (like “sensitivity and specificity”) is added to the search strategy. For more information on using Clinical Queries, view a tutorial or ask us at the MSK Library.