Matt Vassar edited untitled.tex  almost 9 years ago

Commit id: 109a747e94ec165ed5bebbccdedd94cc4b8f2025

deletions | additions      

       

The Pubmed search resulted in 337 articles from four journals. After screening titles and abstracts, 79 were excluded because they were not SRs or meta-analyses. An additional 76 articles were excluded after full text screening. Two articles could not be retrieved after multiple attempts. A total of 182 articles were included in this study (Figure 1).  Methodological quality or risk of bias assessment was conducted in 42\% (77/182) of systematic reviews (2). Of these, 51.95\% (40/77) found either low methodological quality or high risk of bias in primary studies comprising systematic reviews. Studies with an unclear risk of bias or unknown methodological quality were reported in 41.56\% (32/77) of reviews; no issues with study quality or risk of bias were reported in 6.49\% (5/77) of cases.  Most common approaches to evaluating risk of bias or methodological quality were the use of tools designed by authors (23.4\%, n=18/77). The Cochrane Risk of Bias tool was the most commonly report standardized measure used by systematic reviewers (14.3\%, n=11/77), followed by the Newcastle-Ottawa scale (10.4\%, 8/77), the Jadad scale (10.4\%, 8/77), QUADAS-2 (5.19\%, 4/77), and QUADAS (3.9\%, 3/77). 2. Measures adapted from previous work were reported by 13\% (10/77) 2. Other measures used only once and are reported in Table 1 and comprised 10.4\% (8/77) of the approaches used.   There were 25 studies with low quality or high risk of bias that were included with (78\%, n=35/45) 3.From included studies, subgroup analysis was conducted in 13\%, n=11/77) 3. Meta regression was used to address bias and quality problems in 9\% of the 45 articles that assessed quality 3. Sensitivity analysis was used to address bias and quality reporting issues in 18\% of studies analyzed 3.  We examined the scales by which reviewers scored or categorized studies. This information was reported in 56 systematic reviews. For risk of bias assessments, the high/medium/low format was used most commonly (20\%, n=11/56) followed by high/low/unclear (14\%, n=8/56). Methodological quality was most commonly assessed using a 0-5 point scale (16.07\%, 9/56) followed by Good/Fair/Poor (7.14\%, 4/56) a 1-9 point scale (5.36\%, n=3/56).  Methodological quality information were articulated largely in narrative format (44\%, n=34/77) or not at all (44\%, n=34/77) 5. Additional forms of presentation included combinations of figures and narratives (5\%, n=4/77) 5. The combination of table and narrative was also used more than single formats of presentation (3\%, n=2/77) 5.