Background:
Search filter development for adverse effects has tended to focus on retrieving studies of drug interventions. However, a different approach is required for surgical interventions.

Objective:
To develop and validate search filters for MEDLINE and Embase for the adverse effects of surgical interventions.

Methods:
We sought systematic reviews of surgical interventions where the primary focus was to evaluate adverse effect(s). We randomly divided the included studies within these reviews into a development set, evaluation set and validation set. Using word frequency analysis we constructed a sensitivity-maximising search strategy and tested this in the evaluation and validation set.

Results:
We included 358 papers from 19 surgical intervention reviews. We found 352 papers available on MEDLINE and 348 on Embase. Generic adverse effects search strategies in MEDLINE and Embase could achieve approximately 90% relative recall. Recall could be further improved with the addition of specific adverse effects terms to the search strategies. The relative recall achieved from searching with adverse effects terms for surgical interventions is therefore similar to that for drug interventions.

Conclusion:
We have derived and validated a novel search filter that has reasonable performance for identifying adverse effects of surgical interventions in MEDLINE and Embase. However, any search with adverse effects terms is unlikely to achieve 100% recall as a few articles still do not indicate in the title, abstract or indexing that the full paper contains adverse effects data.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement:
The methodological nature of this research means that information professionals are our target audience (consumers). We therefore sought to have two information professionals on our team who were involved at all stages of the research.