Broader reach in searching for adverse events articles - a case study with DOAJ and Crossref

"An efficient strategy for searching for adverse events in scientific literature should find as many relevant events as possible and maintain screening effort within reasonable levels.   Naturally, finding more adverse events is directly related to the question of where to search. Past studies suggest results do improve when searching multiple established proprietary global literature databases. We decided to investigate databases that favor open models of scholarly publications, now gaining traction in the academic world. Can they be a cost-effective way to more adverse events results from the literature?   In this post, we investigate the use of alternative scientific literature sources to complement searching for adverse events on a mainstream index (PubMed). In particular we explored: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes academic literature with an open access license from publishers worldwide. It currently hosts over 5 million records. Crossref: a community organization dedicated to supporting scholarly communication by generating metadata and providing services for content discoverability. The Crossref metadata spans over 120 million records, with a growing proportion being published as open abstracts...."