Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: Revista Médica de Chile (RevMedChile) is the oldest monthly journal of Chilean health science, which is responsible for publishing original articles related to internal medicine and its derived subspecialties. It is the Chilean journal of health science with the highest indexes h5 (26) and m5 (40) in the year 2021 according to SCImago Journal Rank (SJR).
Articles are part of the body of evidence, thus, the base for the clinical decision. Therefore, the data report, interpretation and conclusions of the articles must be coherent. If coherence does not exist, there is a spin bias, existing a risk in the development of inaccurate clinical recommendations.
Objectives: Assess the frequency of spin bias in systematic reviews published in Rev Med Chile between 2017 and 2021.
Methods: We retrieved every article published in RevMedChile during 2017-2021 and made a full text review to identify the first author, country, theme, methodology, conflict of interest and founding, all of them declared on the articles. Only systematic reviews were included for this study. To assess the presence of spin bias, a masked duplicate fashion data extraction was performed by two reviewers. The data extraction consisted of two phases, the first aimed to characterize the methodological quality of each study by applying the 16 item AMSTAR-2 tool. The second phase aimed to identify the presence of the nine most severe types of spin within the abstract of the included articles. After the data extraction reviewers will be unmasked and discuss their results in order to reach consensus. If a discrepancy is found, a third reviewer will be consulted.
Results: We found 1056 articles of which 6 corresponded to systematic reviews of intervention. After applying AMSTAR 2, one of them was classified as low quality and five as critically low quality. Half of the systematic reviews had at least one type of spin bias.
Conclusions: Few systematic reviews were published in revista médica de chile between 2017-2021, most of them had very low methodological quality and half of them had at least one type of spin bias.
Patient, public and/or healthcare consumer involvement: Patients, the public and/or healthcare consumers were not involved in this study.
Articles are part of the body of evidence, thus, the base for the clinical decision. Therefore, the data report, interpretation and conclusions of the articles must be coherent. If coherence does not exist, there is a spin bias, existing a risk in the development of inaccurate clinical recommendations.
Objectives: Assess the frequency of spin bias in systematic reviews published in Rev Med Chile between 2017 and 2021.
Methods: We retrieved every article published in RevMedChile during 2017-2021 and made a full text review to identify the first author, country, theme, methodology, conflict of interest and founding, all of them declared on the articles. Only systematic reviews were included for this study. To assess the presence of spin bias, a masked duplicate fashion data extraction was performed by two reviewers. The data extraction consisted of two phases, the first aimed to characterize the methodological quality of each study by applying the 16 item AMSTAR-2 tool. The second phase aimed to identify the presence of the nine most severe types of spin within the abstract of the included articles. After the data extraction reviewers will be unmasked and discuss their results in order to reach consensus. If a discrepancy is found, a third reviewer will be consulted.
Results: We found 1056 articles of which 6 corresponded to systematic reviews of intervention. After applying AMSTAR 2, one of them was classified as low quality and five as critically low quality. Half of the systematic reviews had at least one type of spin bias.
Conclusions: Few systematic reviews were published in revista médica de chile between 2017-2021, most of them had very low methodological quality and half of them had at least one type of spin bias.
Patient, public and/or healthcare consumer involvement: Patients, the public and/or healthcare consumers were not involved in this study.