Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: With the rapid development of evidence-based medicine in the field of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a lot of low quality systematic reviews have been produced, which may burden the evidence and affect decision-making.
Objectives: In order to explain the importance of registration, this research studies the current situation regarding it.
Methods: Systematic searching of CNKI, VIP, WanFangdatabase, CBM, PubMed, Web of Science (WOS), the Cochrane Library and the PROSPERO registry platform was carried out to included all published SR/MAs about TCM in both Chinese and English. General information was extracted individualy and the report and methodological qualities were assessed independently by PRISMA and AMSTAR checklists. According to data from CNKI and WOS, cited information was identified.
Results: A total of 2460 SR/MAs have been published since 1997 and only 10.85% were published before 2008. All 56 registered research with full text came from the Cochrane Library. The number of SR/MAs written by Chinese people was about 8.36 times (1958/234) more than non-Chinese. However, the number of high methodological and report quality SR/MAs in Chinese are less than 1/4 (19/80) in English. Although the Chinese SR/MAs involved 179 kinds of diseases, 28.72 %（566/1971) concentrated on five single diseases while only 18.20 %（89/1971) in English which brought high recurrence rate of same subject in Chinese. 70.98% Chinese SR/MAs were cited for 7990 times in total, accounting for 5.71 times on average. While the ratio was 67.69% (331/489) in English with total 4903 citations and 9.98 times on average. Within these 331 cited English articles, 289 of them have been cited by Chinese writers in a total of 778 times, which equalized to 2.69 times per articles.
Conclusions: Although the number of TCM SRs increases rapidly, low quality, disease-concentration, outcomes bias of the studies cannot be ignored. Registration may helpful to control the overload evidence and the misleading, especially important for articles in Chinese, because TCM clinicians prefer to produce and use the Chinese SR/MAs due to the language preference and evidence accessibility.
Objectives: In order to explain the importance of registration, this research studies the current situation regarding it.
Methods: Systematic searching of CNKI, VIP, WanFangdatabase, CBM, PubMed, Web of Science (WOS), the Cochrane Library and the PROSPERO registry platform was carried out to included all published SR/MAs about TCM in both Chinese and English. General information was extracted individualy and the report and methodological qualities were assessed independently by PRISMA and AMSTAR checklists. According to data from CNKI and WOS, cited information was identified.
Results: A total of 2460 SR/MAs have been published since 1997 and only 10.85% were published before 2008. All 56 registered research with full text came from the Cochrane Library. The number of SR/MAs written by Chinese people was about 8.36 times (1958/234) more than non-Chinese. However, the number of high methodological and report quality SR/MAs in Chinese are less than 1/4 (19/80) in English. Although the Chinese SR/MAs involved 179 kinds of diseases, 28.72 %（566/1971) concentrated on five single diseases while only 18.20 %（89/1971) in English which brought high recurrence rate of same subject in Chinese. 70.98% Chinese SR/MAs were cited for 7990 times in total, accounting for 5.71 times on average. While the ratio was 67.69% (331/489) in English with total 4903 citations and 9.98 times on average. Within these 331 cited English articles, 289 of them have been cited by Chinese writers in a total of 778 times, which equalized to 2.69 times per articles.
Conclusions: Although the number of TCM SRs increases rapidly, low quality, disease-concentration, outcomes bias of the studies cannot be ignored. Registration may helpful to control the overload evidence and the misleading, especially important for articles in Chinese, because TCM clinicians prefer to produce and use the Chinese SR/MAs due to the language preference and evidence accessibility.