Background:
The development of clinical practice guidelines should be based on systematic reviews. Network meta-analyses are useful in clinical practice guidelines when there is no evidence directly comparing interventions of interest (indirect treatment comparison) or various interventions exist for one clinical question.

Objectives:
This study aims to analyse the proportion of network meta-analyses used in clinical practice guidelines.

Methods:
We searched the PubMed database to obtain network meta-analyses, of which we randomly selected a sample using SPSS 19.0. We then collected the articles that cited the network meta-analysis sample using Google and Web of Science.

Results:
We retrieved a total of 289 network meta-analyses from PubMed and randomly sampled 100. We found that 2026 articles had cited these network meta-analyses, among which 50 (2%) were clinical practice guidelines; this included 12 NGC guidelines and 2 NICE guidelines. All of these clinical practice guidelines citing network meta-analyses were conducted or updated in 2014-2017.

Conclusions:
Network meta-analyses are valuable when multiple pairwise comparisons are presented in clinical practice guidelines. However, we found that a low proportion of network meta-analyses were used in guidelines. Further research on how to improve the application of network meta-analyses in clinical practice guidelines would be valuable.

Patient or healthcare consumer involvement:
None.