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Comparative study reveals differing sensitivity and specificity among search tools for qualitative reviews, indicating PICO optimizes recall while PICOS conserves resources.
The recommendations for practice are therefore to use the PICO tool for a fully comprehensive search but the PICOS tool where time and resources are limited. Based on these limited findings the SPIDER tool would not be recommended due to the risk of not identifying relevant papers, but has potential due to its greater specificity.
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Methley et al. (2014) studied this question.
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