Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Guidelines are systematically developed recommendations to assist practitioner and patient decisions about treatments for clinical conditions. High quality and comprehensive systematic reviews and ‘overviews of systematic reviews’ (overviews) represent the best available evidence. Many guideline developers, such as the WHO and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, recommend the use of these research syntheses to underpin guideline recommendations. We aim to evaluate the impact and use of systematic reviews with and without pairwise meta-analysis or network meta-analyses (NMAs) and overviews in clinical practice guideline (CPG) recommendations.
Methods and analysis CPGs will be retrieved from Turning Research Into Practice and Epistemonikos (2017–2018). The retrieved citations will be sorted randomly and then screened sequentially by two independent reviewers until 50 CPGs have been identified. We will include CPGs that provide at least two explicit recommendations for the management of any clinical condition. We will assess whether reviews or overviews were cited in a recommendation as part of the development process for guidelines. Data extraction will be done independently by two authors and compared. We will assess the risk of bias by examining how each guideline developed clinical recommendations. We will calculate the number and frequency of citations of reviews with or without pairwise meta-analysis, reviews with NMAs and overviews, and whether they were systematically or non-systematically developed. Results will be described, tabulated and categorised based on review type (reviews or overviews). CPGs reporting the use of the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach will be compared with those using a different system, and pharmacological versus non-pharmacological CPGs will be compared.
Ethics and dissemination No ethics approval is required. We will present at the Cochrane Colloquium and the Guidelines International Network conference.
- methodology
- methods study
- meta-epidemiology
- clinical practice guidelines
- systematic reviews
- meta-analyses
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Twitter @carole_lunny
Contributors CL conceived and designed the study. TL, CR, SG and CL screened ten pilot studies. TL, CR, SG and CL pilot extracted the data from ten studies. CL wrote the draft. LP, BM, JW, DMS, TL and CR edited the final manuscript.All authors have met the ICMJE criteria for authorship by having substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; and have approved the final version to be published.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available in a public, open access repository. No data are available. All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.