Evaluation of drug interaction document citation in nine on-line bibliographic databases

OBJECTIVE: To compare nine on-line bibliographic databases to obtain bibliographic references on specific drug interactions. DESIGN: Seven bibliographic databases were selected for their ability to provide information concerning drug interactions: EMBASE, MEDLINE, TOXLINE, BIOSIS, Chemical Abstracts (GAS), PHARMLINE, and International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA). Two French on-line bibliographic databases (i.e., PASCAL, BIBLIOGRAPHIF) were also tested to compare them with the other international databases. Twenty drug interactions were selected randomly using the journal Reactions Weekly 1993. MAIN OUTCOMES MEASURES: The total number of references, the number of potentially relevant references, the number of case report references, the number of unique references in the total number of references, and the number of unique references between potentially relevant references were analyzed by using the Friedman two-way ANOVA by ranks. For each database, relevance and relative recall were calculated. RESULTS: For the total number of references, EMBASE was significantly more comprehensive than all other databases (p< 0.05). EMBASE had a significantly greater number of potentially relevant references than IPA, PHARMLINE, GAS, and BIBLIOGRAPHIF (p < 0.05). For the total number of case report references, only one significant difference, between EMBASE and BIBLIOGRAPHIF (p < 0.05), was observed. MEDLINE and TOXLINE had the lowest cost per potentially relevant reference. CONCLUSIONS: To obtain bibliographic references on drug interactions, the first step should be to search MEDLINE or TOXLINE; the second step, for completeness, should be to search EMBASE.