Critical care research in the World Health Organization Eastern Mediterranean Region over two decades: where do we stand?

Appendices

Appendix 1

Search strategy and search results

• The search terms used were “critical care”, “critical illness”, “intensive care”, “intensive care unit”, “critical care outcome”, and “critically ill”. The search was performed for each country by combining search terms as medical subject headings (MeSH) and as text words in all fields with the name of the country as the MeSH term and as text words. Each search was limited to the study period by using the publication dates 1/1/1997–12/31/2016. There were no language restrictions. A medical librarian consultant reviewed the search terms and strategy before conducting the search.

• Articles included were those that described critical care research conducted in countries in the EMR or reviews and meta-analysis on critical care topics in which the primary author was from a country in the EMR. Case reports, editorials, and studies conducted in vitro and in animals were excluded, as were multi-country studies and those evaluating foreign military medical practice in EMR countries.

• The search strategy revealed 4597 publications, of which 1842 were included in this analysis, and 2755 were excluded for the following reasons: did not evaluate critically ill patients (n = 1309, 47%), conducted in a non-EMR country (n = 546, 20%), editorial, case report, animal or in vitro studies (n = 446, 16%), multi-country studies (n = 204, 7%), and evaluated foreign military personnel (n = 250, 9%).

Appendix 2

Categories for research fields

Administration	Infectious disease
Burn	Neuroscience
Cardiovascular	Patient and family support
Cardio-pulmonary resuscitation	Pharmacology
Education	Professional development
Endocrine/nutrition	Quality and safety
Epidemiology	Renal
Ethics/end of life/palliative	Respiratory
Gastrointestinal	Surgery
Hematology	Trauma
Immunology/transplant