Erratum

Article Outline

• Copyright

In the June 2005 issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, the article by Susan Wieland and Kay Dickersin entitled “Selective exposure reporting and Medline indexing limited the search sensitivity for observational studies of the adverse effects of oral contraceptives” (vol. 58, no. 6, pp 560–567) presented incorrect information in 2 instances.

Section 3.3 Search results (page 562) should read:

For both our MeSH term and text word searches, our most precise search was that which included intervention, outcome, and study design terms (11% for MeSH and 3% for text word), but our most sensitive search was that which omitted intervention terms (sensitivity=100% for both; see Table 1). Text word searches were always less precise than MeSH term searches and did not meaningfully improve sensitivity.

Appendix A (page 564; second paragraph) should read:

As of 2004, five citations indexed with “Estrogens” or “Estradiol” but not “Contraceptives, Oral” would therefore no longer be retrieved by search A1. Three of these five citations contain no mention of oral contraceptives in the full text. Two citations indexed with “estradiol” but not “estrogen” or “Contraceptives, Oral” would no longer be retrieved by searches A2 or A3. One of these citations contains no mention of oral contraceptives in the full text.