Application of Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (PRESS) to assess the quality of systematic reviews search strategies

Health decisions are based on scientific evidence and these are the product of published scientific research. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are studies considered of excellence in the production of evidence in the biomedical area and, in order to carry out these studies, an extensive literature search in bibliographic databases is necessary. The construction of search strategies in electronic databases was identified as a key point in the evidence base of systematic reviews, which is a task specific to the information professional. Assessing search strategies is important and can contribute to increasing the quality of systematic reviews. This paper aims to use the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies for the qualitative analysis of the search strategies of 57 selected studies, followed by a quantitative analysis. In order to draw a local and thematic panorama, studies were chosen with authors from Brazilian institutions in the field of dentistry in 2015. The results showed that most of the analyzed strategies were poorly reported and what was published contains errors that do not guarantee the reproducibility of the search. The evidence base of these systematic reviews may be compromised, which reinforces the need for the participation of information professionals in systematic review teams.