How Often Do Systematic Reviews Exclude Articles Not Published in English?

Ref ID 73
First Author J. L. Jackson
Journal JOURNAL OF GENERAL INTERNAL MEDICINE
Year Of Publishing 2019
URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6667563/pdf/11606_2019_Article_4976.pdf
Keywords • General medical
• Language
Problem(s) • Language restriction
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country United States
Aim To assess the frequency that systematic reviews are limited to studies published in English in PubMed through December 15, 2018.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings From 250 included systematic reviews 84 (34%) explicitly excluded non-English articles, 80 (32%) had no statement about excluding non-English trials, though none included non-English articles, and 86 (34%) indicated that they did their search without language restriction. Of the 86 reviews without language restrictions, only 19 (22%) included non-English trials, representing 2% of the total articles included in these studies.
Number of systematic reviews included 63
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 224
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description