Development and Validation of PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE Search Filters for Exposure Pathways Linking Climate Change With Public Health.

INTRODUCTION: Climate change has major health impacts to which researchers and policymakers need to respond. The volume and multidisciplinary nature of climate-health evidence pose challenges to its comprehensive identification. Search filters are currently not available for this topic. Our aim was to empirically develop sensitivity-maximizing climate-health search filters for two interfaces of the MEDLINE database. METHODS: Climate change impacts health via several exposure pathways involving distinct mechanisms: extreme weather events, heat stress, air quality, water quality and quantity, food supply and safety, vector distribution and ecology, and social factors. Using the relative recall method, we established a gold standard by extracting included studies of 110 evidence syntheses and classifying them into exposure pathways. From this set, we empirically derived and validated filters per pathway. RESULTS: Based on 1572 primary studies indexed in PubMed, we developed filters with a sensitivity of 95%, 97% and 99% for six of the seven major climate-health exposure pathways. CONCLUSION: We designed the first empirically derived search filters for climate-health pathways, enabling sensitive retrieval despite acknowledged limitations. Our filters can be applied to different types of research questions at the intersection of climate and health.