# Assessment of search strategies in Medline to identify studies on the impact of long COVID on workability

## TL;DR

This study evaluates search strategies in PubMed to find research on how long COVID affects workability, highlighting the need for combined keyword approaches.

## Contribution

The study develops optimized search strings to improve retrieval of long COVID workability studies in PubMed.

## Key findings

- Using single MeSH terms had low recall (23%) but combining terms improved it to 90%.
- Two search strings achieved high recall (98.3% and 90.8%) with acceptable precision (15.9% and 26.1%).
- Combined MeSH and non-MeSH terms are necessary to effectively retrieve relevant studies.

## Abstract

Studies on the impact of long COVID on work capacity are increasing but are difficult to locate in bibliographic databases, due to the heterogeneity of the terms used to describe this new condition and its consequences. This study aims to report on the effectiveness of different search strategies to find studies on the impact of long COVID on work participation in PubMed and to create validated search strings.

We searched PubMed for articles published on Long COVID and including information about work. Relevant articles were identified and their reference lists were screened. Occupational health journals were manually scanned to identify articles that could have been missed. A total of 885 articles potentially relevant were collected and 120 were finally included in a gold standard database. Recall, Precision, and Number Needed to Read (NNR) of various keywords or combinations of keywords were assessed.

Overall, 123 search-words alone or in combination were tested. The highest Recalls with a single MeSH term or textword were 23 and 90%, respectively. Two different search strings were developed, one optimizing Recall while keeping Precision acceptable (Recall 98.3%, Precision 15.9%, NNR 6.3) and one optimizing Precision while keeping Recall acceptable (Recall 90.8%, Precision 26.1%, NNR 3.8).

No single MeSH term allows to find all relevant studies on the impact of long COVID on work ability in PubMed. The use of various MeSH and non-MeSH terms in combination is required to recover such studies without being overwhelmed by irrelevant articles.