Overviews of reviews often have limited rigor: a systematic review

Ref ID 612
First Author D. Pieper
Journal JOURNAL OF CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY
Year Of Publishing 2012
URL https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(12)00208-9/pdf
Keywords • General medical
• Overviews/Umbrella Reviews
• Risk of bias
• Low methodological quality
Problem(s) • Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• No quality assessment undertaken or reported
• Lack of guidance or consistency in systematic overview / umbrella / review of systematic reviews
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Germany
Aim To examine the descriptive and methodological characteristics of systematic overviews of systematic reviews indexed across multiple databases up to February 2012.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Approximately one-third of the 126 included overviews did not perform quality assessment. Strategies to deal with discordant reviews were reported in 5% of the overviews. Searches for additional primary studies were conducted in 5% of the overviews.
Number of systematic reviews included 126
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 6380
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description