Search strategies in systematic reviews: IQWiG develops its own app, which is also publicly available

To determine the correct terms for strategies for systematic searches in bibliographic databases, the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) previously used software that was primarily designed for other purposes and was therefore inflexible.

With this in mind, staff in IQWiG's Information Management Department started a project in 2022 to develop a tool that would be flexible and yet tailored to the specific use case. They chose "R" as the programming language - a beginner-friendly language for creating graphical user interfaces, for which there are already many freely available open source packages that the team could draw upon.

In 2023, the searchbuildR app was ready and the team implemented the app on an IQWiG shiny server. As the IQWiG team was able to draw upon other open source packages during development, the app is available under a free license and can therefore be used by other researchers and adapted to their own needs. In June 2023, IQWiG therefore also published the source code for the app on GitHub, an open repository for collaborative software development.

The title of the article is “The searchbuildR shiny app: A new implementation of the objective approach for search strategy development in systematic reviews”. It has now been published in the journal "Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods". In the article the IQWiG team describes in detail how searchbuildR works and how other researchers can use the software to systematically search bibliographic databases.

The app has been in regular use at IQWiG since July 2023. Following this pilot project, IQWiG's processes for developing and maintaining shiny apps are now being consolidated. The aim is to identify further working steps, e.g. in the areas of information retrieval and medical statistics, that can be automated with the help of a shiny app in the future.