Identification of risk conditions for the development of adrenal disorders: how optimized PubMed search strategies makes the difference

The exponential growth of scientific literature available through electronic databases (namely PubMed) has increased the chance of finding interesting articles. At the same time, search has become more complicated, time consuming, and at risk of missing important information. Therefore, optimized strategies have to be adopted to maximize searching impact. The aim of this study was to formulate efficient strings to search PubMed for etiologic associations between adrenal disorders (ADs) and other conditions. A comprehensive list of terms identifying endogenous conditions primarily affecting adrenals was compiled. An ad hoc analysis was performed to find the best way to express each term in order to find the highest number of potentially pertinent articles in PubMed. A predefined number of retrieved abstracts were read to assess their association with ADs’ etiology. A more sensitive (providing the largest literature coverage) and a more specific (including only those terms retrieving >40 % of potentially pertinent articles) string were formulated. Various researches were performed to assess strings’ ability to identify articles of interest in comparison with non-optimized literature searches. We formulated optimized, ready applicable tools for the identification of the literature assessing etiologic associations in the field of ADs using PubMed, and demonstrated the advantages deriving from their application. Detailed description of the methodological process is also provided, so that this work can easily be translated to other fields of practice.