Precision and Sensitivity: A Surrogate for Quality of Literature Search in Systematic Reviews

The adequacy of the literature search is one of the critical domains that affect the quality of the systematic review. The aim of a literature search in the systematic review should be to obtain thorough, comprehensive, transparent, and reproducible results. Precision (also called "positive predictive value") and sensitivity (also called "recall") have been postulated as 2 markers for rating the quality of literature search in systematic reviews. The reporting of such measures shall help in improving the relevance, transparency, reproducibility, and comprehensibility of the search. A search strategy that maximizes sensitivity with reasonable precision shall improve the quality of the review.