Matt Vassar edited untitled.tex  almost 9 years ago

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\section{Discussion/Conclusion}  This study provides a comprehensive and recent assessment of methodological quality and risk of bias assessment in oncology journals. Our main findings indicate that reporting of quality assessment in systematic reviews and meta-analyses in major oncology journals was moderate to low, with actual assessment of methodological quality  being present in only 48\% of studies. This is low in comparison to similar studies assessing frequency of risk of bias evaluations. Hopewell et al., for example, found that 80\% of non-Cochrane reviews reported methods for evaluating methodological quality or risk of bias. The inclusion of studies with high risk of bias or low quality in deriving summary effects was also an issue, with 76\% of studies in our sample including such studies in calculating results; however, this is comparable to the proportion of trials with high risk of bias included in previous studies. Hopewell reported that 75\% of trials in their study contained one or more trials with a high risk of bias \cite{hopewell2013incorporation}. It should be noted that Hopewell et al. used the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which is known for its stringent adherence to Cochrane guidelines, of which risk of bias evaluations are a routine part. This may contribute to differences between our findings and theirs. Despite the presence of high risk of bias or low quality studies, most review authors did not conduct further analysis to explore the influence of bias on study outcomes. Perhaps more interesting was the number of systematic reviews reporting an assessment of study quality that let the reader to wonder what came of these evaluations. A significant number included such studies without further mention of the quality of evidence. Narrative styles of presenting information for quality assessment were the most common means of presenting this information; however, the use of a table format would provide readers with easier access to quality or risk of bias information. We advocate for a more structured approach, such as tables published in the review, to display such information.  Future research should continue to investigate these evaluation practices from systematic reviews in other clinical specialties. While the majority of research has been confined largely to Cochrane systematic reviews as well as those published in high profile medical journals, there is a need to understand whether systematic reviewers in clinical specialties conduct these assessments, and if so, what assessment they used.  \section{Acknowledgements}  We are grateful for the assistance of planning study design and coding format from Matt Vassar, PhD, from Oklahoma State University Center of Health Sciences, and to Chelsea Koller, Jonathan Holmes, and David Herrmann for assistance in compiling and coding data from our set of articles.  Chemotherapy with cetuximab versus chemotherapy alone for chemotherapy-naive advanced non-small cell lung cancer.Yang ZY1, Liu L, Mao C, Wu XY, Huang YF, Hu XF, Tang JL.