Cochrane risk of bias tool was used inadequately in the majority of non-Cochrane systematic reviews

Ref ID 369
First Author L. Puljak
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2020
URL https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0895435619307206
Keywords • Risk of bias
• General medical
Problem(s) • Flawed risk of bias undertaken
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Croatia
Aim To assess use of the Cochrane risk of bias tool in non-Cochrane reviews including which domains were used and whether judgement and comments about risk of bias were in line with the Cochrane Handbook from reviews indexed in PubMed in 2018.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Of eligible reviews, 85% reported that they analysed risk of bias and 53% used the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Of these (n=269) only 5.9% reported both a judgment and a supporting comment in the Cochrane risk of bias table in the manuscript or in a supplementary file. 41% of analysed available judgments were inadequate, either because the judgement was not in line with the comment or the comment was missing.
Number of systematic reviews included 508
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 1852
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description