Authorea

A. Benjamin Chong added To_ensure_accurate_coding_and__.tex almost 9 years ago

Commit id: 8a98aedb9959879ac3b6882fee2c5aeb04cc07c2

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To ensure accurate coding and clear directions, an abstraction manual was developed and piloted prior to training coders. A training session was conducted to familiarize coders with the process, and a subset of studies from the screening process were jointly coded as a group. Coding elements included: title of the article, authors’ names, year of publication, journal, whether authors simply discussed PB in the narrative, whether authors formally evaluated PB, and if so, the method used to evaluate, whether a funnel plot was presented as a figure in the article, whether PB was found, the number of studies included in the analysis, reporting guidelines followed (if any), whether foreign language articles were included in the search and, if so, the particular languages listed, whether authors used reference lists or hand searching to find potential articles, whether grey literature searches were used to locate unpublished articles, and whether clinical trial registries were searched. After training, each coder was given three new articles to code independently. These data were analyzed for inter-rater agreement by calculating the Kappa statistic. As inter-rater agreement was acceptable (k = 0.65; agreement = 75 percent), each coder was assigned an equal number of articles to code. After the initial coding process, validation checks were conducted such that each coded element was verified by a second coder. After these checks were performed, coders met to discuss disagreements and settle them by consensus. Analysis of the final data was conducted using STATA 13.1. Data from this study are publicly available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1486377.