Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: The development of clinical practice guidelines should be based on systematic reviews and other high quality of evidence such as RCTs. Little is known about how many systematic reviews cited by Chinese clinical practice guidelines.
Objectives: To conduct a cross-sectional study to investigate the number and types of systematic reviews cited by Chinese clinical practice guidelines.
Methods: We searched CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure/Chinese Academic Journals full text Database), VIP (a fulltext database of China), WANFANG (a fulltext database of China) and CBM (China Biomedicine Database). Two groups of review authors independently applied inclusion criteria, assessed trial quality, and extracted data.
Results: We included 269 Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in Chinese medical journals. There were 3791 citations and only 3.5% (133) are systematic reviews. Each guideline cited 0.49 systematic reviews, ranging from no citations to 15 citations. A total of 37 Cochrane systematic reviews were cited, with a mean of 0.14 in each guideline, compared with 6.9 in NICE clinical guidelines.
Conclusions: Very few Chinese clinical practice guidelines used systematic reviews. The use of Cochrane systematic reviews in NICE clinical guidelines is 49 times than Chinese clinical practice guidelines. Chinese guideline developers should routinely search for existing relevant systematic reviews when they develop guidelines, especially Cochrane systematic reviews.
Objectives: To conduct a cross-sectional study to investigate the number and types of systematic reviews cited by Chinese clinical practice guidelines.
Methods: We searched CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure/Chinese Academic Journals full text Database), VIP (a fulltext database of China), WANFANG (a fulltext database of China) and CBM (China Biomedicine Database). Two groups of review authors independently applied inclusion criteria, assessed trial quality, and extracted data.
Results: We included 269 Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in Chinese medical journals. There were 3791 citations and only 3.5% (133) are systematic reviews. Each guideline cited 0.49 systematic reviews, ranging from no citations to 15 citations. A total of 37 Cochrane systematic reviews were cited, with a mean of 0.14 in each guideline, compared with 6.9 in NICE clinical guidelines.
Conclusions: Very few Chinese clinical practice guidelines used systematic reviews. The use of Cochrane systematic reviews in NICE clinical guidelines is 49 times than Chinese clinical practice guidelines. Chinese guideline developers should routinely search for existing relevant systematic reviews when they develop guidelines, especially Cochrane systematic reviews.