Article type
Abstract
Background:
Funding of systematic reviews by drug, device and imaging companies, and other conflicts of interest may impact how reviews are conducted.Objective:
To investigate to which degree industry funding and other financial conflicts of interest are associated with results, conclusions and methodological quality of systematic reviews.Methods:
Cochrane methodology review. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, and the Cochrane Methodology Register. Furthermore, we searched the reference lists of included studies and Web of Science for studies citing any of the included studies. We included observational studies of any design that investigated systematic reviews with and without industry funding or other financial conflicts of interest, published up to November 2016. For studies to be eligible, they had to investigate at least one of ouroutcomes:
effect-size estimates, favourable conclusions, and methodological quality.Two authors independently assessed full text of potentially eligible studies, extracted data, and assessed risk of bias by assessing adequacy in relation to study inclusion, data extraction, and comparability of the investigated samples of systematic reviews.
We plan to assess the associations between industry funding including other financial conflicts of interest and each of our outcomes in a meta-analysis, if meaningful. Due to the anticipated heterogeneity between the observational studies, we will use random-effects models. If meta-analysis is not meaningful, the results will be reported descriptively.