Contacting of authors by systematic reviewers: protocol for a cross-sectional study and a survey

摘要

BackgroundSynthesizing outcomes of underreported primary studies can pose a serious threat to the validity of outcomes and conclusions of systematic reviews. To address this problem, the Cochrane Collaboration recommends reviewers to contact authors of eligible primary studies to obtain additional information on poorly reported items. In this protocol, we present a cross-sectional study and a survey to assess (1) how reviewers of new Cochrane intervention reviews report on procedures and outcomes of contacting of authors of primary studies to obtain additional data, (2) how authors reply, and (3) the consequences of these additional data on the outcomes and quality scores in the review. All research questions and methods were pilot tested on 2 months of Cochrane reviews and were subsequently fine-tuned.