Background: Clinical practice brings to health professionals daily problems that need to be solved with promptness, at reduced costs and aiming to improve safety during prevention, diagnostic, and treatment of our patients. Clinicians tend to keep themselves up-to-date by selecting among the huge quantity of research sources, such as books, printed and electronic journals. However, it is a challenge to judge appropriateness of research to respond to a certain clinical question.
Objectives: To evaluate the methodological quality and appropriateness of the study design about voice and larynx published on speech language pathologist and otorhinolaryngology journals (indexed on ISI® and MEDLINE databases) to answer a relevant clinical question.
Methods: Cross Sectional study. Four magazines, two Brazilian and two international, were chosen after a survey among specialists. All issues were handsearched from 2000 to 2004 by one speech language pathologist and one otorhinolaryngologist. Articles were classified according to the specified objective and the selected study design. The objectives were classified in eight different categories, according to the researched clinical question: diagnosis, prevention, treatment, prognostic, primary diagnostic evaluation, prevalence, risk factor and others. Research design were classified into eleven different categories: case reports, case series, cross-sectional studies, diagnostic accuracy studies, case-control studies, cohort studies, historical cohort studies, randomized clinical trials, narrative reviews, systematic reviews, and the classified as others. The studies were considered methodologically appropriate when, for each clinical question the research design considered as the best evidence level was used.
Results: The selected magazines were: Pró-Fono, Revista Brasileira de Otorrinolaringologia, Journal of Voice and Laryngoscope. The most common objective identified on the papers was the primary diagnostic evaluation (27%), and the most common study design was case-series (33.7%). Study design appropriate to answer the proposed clinical question was observed in only 7.8% of the 378 selected articles. There was no statistical significant difference regarding appropriateness of study design among the four journals in both databases (ISI® and MEDLINE).
Conclusion: The studies published on the two Brazilian journals with MEDLINE indexation and the two international journals with ISI® indexation were weak regarding methodology, with research designs incompatible to the proposed objectives in most cases. Published studies based on case reports without a full description of methods still predominate.