| Ref ID | 375 |
| First Author | S. Golder |
| Journal | JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY |
| Year Of Publishing | 2008 |
| URL | https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(07)00217-X/fulltext |
| Keywords |
• Reproducibility • General medical • Harms • Searching |
| Problem(s) |
• Methods not described to enable replication • Insufficient literature searches • Reliance on randomised controlled trials for harms / safety data |
| Article Type | Empirical |
| Article Subtype | Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review |
| First Author Country | United Kingdom |
| Aim | To assess the methods used to identify relevant studies for systematic reviews of adverse effects from the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews between 1994 and 2005. |
| Level of Investigation | Descriptive |
| Summary of Findings | Less than 5% of the included systematic reviews of adverse effects reported enough detail for the searches to be reproducible. The majority of reviews did not indicate whether they used any language restrictions. Many of the reported literature searches relied solely on indexing or text-word searches, with little use of synonyms and truncation. Few reviews (14%) attempted to source information from pharmaceutical companies. The majority of reviews did not search more than one or two databases, and few other methods of identifying information were used. |
| Number of systematic reviews included | 277 |
| Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed | 320 |
| Treatment impacted | No |
| Treatment impacted description | |
| Interpretation impacted | Not Applicable |
| Interpretation impacted description |