EBM metadata based on Dublin Core better presenting validity of clinical trials

J Med Syst. 2007 Oct;31(5):337-43. doi: 10.1007/s10916-007-9073-0.

Abstract

To help clinicians find better evidence, a metadata schema for Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) is developed. Dublin Core metadata standard (DC) was adopted to help build a metadata schema. An experimental system was developed to test the validity of the metadata and full text papers of clinical therapy on stomach ulcer extracted using PubMed. An EBM metadata schema was developed. Citations were created from original papers using the metadata schema. Three clinicians evaluated papers by utilizing metadata and full texts respectively. Agreement of evaluation was analyzed, and the result on weighted kappa was 0.55 (95% CI, 0.42-0.67). It reveals that there is moderate agreement between evaluation of metadata citations and full texts. It is possible to use the metadata to select papers before reading the full texts. A further study should be made to prove the applicability of the metadata in the real world setting.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Clinical Trials as Topic / standards*
  • Database Management Systems
  • Databases, Factual*
  • Evidence-Based Medicine / standards*
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods
  • Pilot Projects
  • Reproducibility of Results