The fate of urological systematic reviews registered in PROSPERO
- PDF / 863,078 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 3 Downloads / 206 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The fate of urological systematic reviews registered in PROSPERO Sari Khaleel1,2 · Brent Cleveland1,2 · Arveen Kalapara1,3 · Niranjan Sathianathen1,3 · Priyamvadha Balaji1 · Philipp Dahm1,2 Received: 8 July 2019 / Accepted: 20 November 2019 © This is a U.S. Government work and not under copyright protection in the US; foreign copyright protection may apply 2019
Abstract Purpose To identify urologic systematic reviews (SRs) registered to PROSPERO that resulted in a publication, and to evaluate their methodological quality and concordance with their stated a priori protocols. Methods We searched PubMed to identify urologic SR protocols registered in PROSPERO that resulted in a publication and assessed their methodological quality and protocols in relation to their stated a priori protocols in PROSPERO. Results Of the 576 urologic SR protocols registered in PROSPERO up to December 2017, 201 (34.9%) resulted in a full SR publication, but only 40 (17.7%) updated their registration record accordingly. Publications were spread over 100 different journals, with a median time-to-publication of 29 months (95% CI 25.0–33.0). The most common topic by far was prostate cancer (59.7%), followed by voiding issues (15.3%), and renal transplantation (15.3%). Only little over half the reviews (52.74%) explicitly stated primary outcome(s) that matched the primary outcome of their corresponding PROSPERO protocol. Notable methodologic deviations from registered protocols included planned restriction on study design (33%), heterogeneity analysis (42%) and planned risk of bias analysis (65.2%). Conclusion SR authors in urology are increasingly using PROSPERO to register their titles, but our findings indicate that registration alone is not a guarantor of a high-quality SR product. There appears to be a critical need to raise the bar for review authors registering protocols in PROSPERO, with an emphasis on transparency in their publication status updates as well as deviations from their a priori protocols. Keywords Systematic reviews · Meta-analysis · Evidence-based medicine · Protocol · PROSPERO
Introduction Systematic reviews (SRs) are an important tool for the synthesis and critical appraisal of original research to answer specific clinical questions. There has been an exponential increase in the number of SRs published in the urological literature [1–3]. This may be driven in part by an increased recognition of their importance in guiding evidence-based clinical practice, but also by their potential for generating citations and increasing a journal’s impact factor. * Philipp Dahm [email protected] 1
Department of Urology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
2
Urology Section 112D, Minneapolis VA Medical Center, One Veterans Drive, Minneapolis, MN 55417, USA
3
Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Australia
Unfortunately, several studies suggest that the majority of current SRs are of low or modest quality [2, 4]. This has led several journals to enforce me
Data Loading...
