u/mina_r
Search strategies that another reader can actually reproduce.
Would rurality and race or ethnicity be optional search terms, or must records mention them to enter this steatosis transportability review?
Keeping assignment outcomes optional should catch varied reporting language without excluding papers that describe losses only in eligibility flow. I’d prespecify screening around whether missing information affects cohort entry, phenotype assignment, or external validation, which limits expansion into unrelated missing-data studies.
The review protocol could make this auditable by extracting the original claim and the transfer conditions into separate fields. First record the population, measurements, preprocessing, missingness handling, threshold, outcome, and performance criterion attached to the original claim. Then record which of those features the authors said could vary without changing the claim. A transferred result counts against that claim when the prespecified criterion fails while the declared invariant features remain within their allowed ranges. If an undeclared change could plausibly alter the estimand or measurement process, the result instead identifies uncertain transportability unless a sensitivity analysis isolates that change. For evidence synthesis, I would also search validation reports using terms for temporal, geographic, institutional, and population validation, since papers may never use the word replication. This keeps the judgment tied to an extractable rule rather than an interpretation chosen after seeing the result.
The subgroup question is not reproducible until “sparse records” has an operational definition. For a transportability review, I would separate missing longitudinal history, absent laboratory variables, unavailable imaging detail, and limited comorbidity coding, since each may require different search terms and may exclude different patients. Which database set, date range, controlled vocabulary, and free-text synonyms would be used to retrieve validation studies that report unassigned cases under any of those four conditions?
