Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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The importance of systematic reviews (SRs) as an aid to decision making in health care has led to an increasing interest in the development of this type of study. When selecting a target journal for publication, authors generally seek out higher impact factor journals. This study aimed to determine the percentage of scientific medical journals that publish SRs according to their impact factors (>2.63) and to determine whether those journals require tools that aim to improve SR reporting and meta-analyses. ⋯ The majority of the journals do not mention the acceptance of SRs in the instructions for authors section. Only a few journals require that SRs meet specific reporting guidelines, making interpretation of their findings across studies challenging. There is no correlation between the impact factor of the journal and its acceptance of SRs for publication.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study
Expected net benefit of clinical pharmacy in intensive care medicine: a randomized interventional comparative trial with matched before-and-after groups.
This study evaluated clinical pharmacy costs against drug costs. ⋯ The randomized interventional comparative trial in a small ICU patient group suggested the potential cost-benefit of clinical pharmacy on daily ICU drug costs. However, after matching, this benefit was attenuated. A final conclusion demands a larger randomized trial adopting a similar design with matched controls. Future research should include clinical impact of recommendations.
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Given the increasing emphasis being placed on managing patients with chronic diseases within primary care, there is a need to better understand which primary care organizational attributes affect the quality of care that patients with chronic diseases receive. This study aimed to identify, summarize and compare data collection tools that describe and measure organizational attributes used within the primary care setting worldwide. ⋯ There is a need to collect primary care organizational attribute information at a national level to better understand factors affecting the quality of chronic disease prevention and management across a given country. The data collection tools identified in this review can be used to establish data collection strategies to collect this important information.
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Comparative Study
Does the CONSORT checklist for abstracts improve the quality of reports of randomized controlled trials on clinical pathways?
The extension of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement provides reporting guidelines to improve the reporting quality of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). This present study was aim to assess the reporting quality of abstracts of RCTs on clinical pathway. ⋯ The reporting quality of abstracts of RCTs on clinical pathway still should be improved. After the publication of CONSORT for abstracts guideline, the RCT abstracts reporting quality were improvement to some extent. The abstracts in Chinese journals showed non-adherence to the CONSORT for abstracts guidelines.
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The quality of the current literature on external validity varies considerably. An improved checklist with validated items on external validity would aid decision-makers in judging similarities among circumstances when transferring evidence from a study setting to an implementation setting. In this paper, currently available checklists on external validity are identified, assessed and used as a basis for proposing a new improved instrument. ⋯ This paper provides building blocks for the development of a new checklist for external validity. The next step is provision of empirical evidence for the checklist items to be selected, and finally, development and validation of a checklist on external validity.