The PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews and meta analyses of nursing interventions published in China

Article type
Authors
Shi C1, Wei H1, Zhu L1, Wang X1, Tian J1
1Evidence-Based Medicine Center of Lanzhou University, China
Abstract
Background: Publication bias in a systematic review (SR)/ Meta-Analyses (MA) occurs mostly during the selection process and a transparent selection process is necessary to avoid such bias. The Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Statement was published to help authors improve how they report SRs/MAs.

Objectives: To identify SRs/MAs of nursing interventions published in China and to evaluate their reporting quality by PRISMA.

Methods: An electronic literature search of all SRs/MAs of nursing interventions from inception to October 2011 was conducted using the Chinese Biomedical Literature Database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure, using the following text and keywords in combination both MeSH terms and text words, the search strategy was (meta analysis OR meta analyses OR systematic review* OR overreview) AND nurs*. Details of the relevant aspects of methodology as reported in these SRs/MAs were extracted from the full text publications. Reporting quality was assessed independently by two reviewers using the PRISMA.

Results: Seventy-four SRs/MAs were included, 54.05% stated the research objective; 74.32% reported eligibility criteria; 4.05% provided full electronic search strategy; 16.22% stated the process for selecting studies; 63.51% described method of data extraction from reports; 55.41% provided the included and excluded studies with reason; all studies didn’t reported a flow diagram; 58.11% stated the results of individuals studies and synthesis of results in forest plot; 39.19% assessed publication bias, which were with a priori report in 29.73% studies; 39.19% reported methods of additional analyses; 70.27% discussed limitations; 12.16% described sources of funding; all studies reported structured summary, rationale for the review, risk of bias, summary measures, methods of handling data and combining results of studies, study characteristics and summary of evidence.

Conclusions: The reporting quality of SRs/MAs of nursing interventions was poor Chinese authors should adopt the PRISMA statement to improve the reporting quality of SRs/MAs in this field.