• Yu Wang, Jun Guo, Tingting Xiong, Fangfang Wang, Guoxian Kou, and Hong Ning.
• Department of Pharmacy.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2020 Dec 11; 99 (50): e23643e23643.

Background And AimIntraabdominal infection (IAI) is a common and important disease worldwide. An increasing number of related guidelines/consensuses have been published in recent years, the quality evaluation for these guidelines/consensuses is necessary to identify lower-quality documents and explore the quality distribution in different time range and areas in this field.MethodsThe Appraisal of Guidelines for Research & Evaluation Instrument tool was adopted to assess the quality of IAI guidelines/consensuses by 3 researchers independently. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) among the researchers were retrieved to reflect reliability. The quality differences of these guidelines/consensuses issued before and after May 2009, both international and non-international, were compared by a Mann-Whitney U test.ResultsFourteen IAI guidelines/consensuses published in English were obtained following a literature search. The ICCs among the researchers were all above 0.75, indicating satisfactory reliability. This outcome showed that the overall quality of these guidelines/consensuses was mediocre and considered acceptable in all items. A few guidelines/consensuses were better in their scientific and methodological characteristics than the others. Moreover, there were no significant differences in the scores between the guidelines/consensuses issued before and after May 2009 or between international vs regional guidelines/consensuses.ConclusionsOverall, the quality of the IAI guidelines/consensuses was generally acceptable and applicable, with a few deficiencies. Therefore, continuous improvement is essential. The guideline assessment tools should be applied in guideline/consensus development both widely and strictly to improve the methodological quality.

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