Quality of Systematic Reviews of the Foods with Function Claims in Japan: Comparative Before- and After-Evaluation of Verification Reports by the Consumer Affairs Agency

Ref ID 190
First Author H. Kamioka
Journal NUTRIENTS
Year Of Publishing 2019
URL https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/nutrients/nutrients-11-01583/article_deploy/nutrients-11-01583-v3.pdf
Keywords Reproducibility
Nutrition
Publication bias
Risk of bias
Pre-specification
Searching
Problem(s) Methods not described to enable replication
Insufficient literature searches
Poor consideration of publication bias
Limited quality assessment or no risk of bias
Flawed risk of bias undertaken
Risk of bias not incorporated into conclusions of review
Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
Lack of prespecification in eligibility criteria
Number of systematic reviews included 104
Summary of Findings Of the 104 included systematic reviews of Food with Function claims registered in the Consumer Affairs Agency website in Japan between 2015 and 2017, quality was poor for seven items of the 11-item checklist. In particular, there were very poor descriptions and/or implementations of study selection and data extraction, search strategy, evaluation methods for risk of bias, assessment of publication bias, and formulating conclusions based on methodological rigor and scientific quality of the included studies.
Did the article find that the problem(s) led to qualitative changes in interpretation of the results? Not Applicable
Are the methods of the article described in enough detail to replicate the study? No