SEARCHING FOR THE EVIDENCE

Conducting good occupational intervention studies is a challenge; but locating and retrieving those that have already been conducted is not straightforward either. Verbeek et al¹ tested alternative electronic search strategies against a gold standard of hand searching. Through the more labour intensive approach they identified 149 papers on occupational health interventions among 11 022 articles contained in two whole volumes of 19 specialised and other biomedical journals. No single set of electronic search terms retrieved every article, but the best search strings had an acceptable sensitivity and specificity for many purposes. Practitioners and researchers who wish to bypass the considerable effort of hand …