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BackgroundSystematic reviews are a commonly used research design in the medical field to synthesize study findings. At present—although several systematic reviews of patient preference studies are published—there is no clear guidance available for researchers to conduct this type of systematic review. The aim of our study was to learn the most current practice of conducting these systematic reviews by conducting a survey of the literature regarding reviews of quantitative patient preference studies.MethodsOur survey included systematic reviews of studies that used a stated quantitative preference design to elicit patient preferences. We identified eligible reviews through a search of the PubMed database. Two investigators with knowledge of the design of patient preference studies independently screened the titles and abstracts, and where needed, screened the full-text of the reviews to determine eligibility. We developed and pilot-tested a form to extract data on the methods used in each systematic review.ResultsOur search and screening identified 29 eligible reviews. A large proportion of the reviews (19/29, 66%) were published in 2014 or after; among them, nine reviews were published in 2016. The median number of databases searched for preference studies was four (interquartile range = 2 to 7). We found that less than half of the reviews (13/29, 45%) clearly reported assessing risk of bias or the methodological quality of the included preference studies; not a single review was able to perform quantitative synthesis (meta-analysis) of the data on patient preferences.ConclusionThese results suggest that several methodological issues of performing systematic reviews of patient preferences are not yet fully addressed by research and that the methodology may require future development.

Aim The magnitude of stressful life events can be measured by using rating scales such as the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. This study aimed to estimate the magnitude of stressful life events by using a best–worst scaling approach in a sample of community‐dwelling older persons in Taiwan. Methods Participants aged 55 years or older were asked to rate the stressfulness of 11 life events on a scale from 0 to 10 and the best–worst scaling. We used the case one (object case) best–worst scaling design: each task on a list of events was presented to participants, and they were asked to indicate the events that they considered most and least stressful. Results A total of 61 persons (66% women) provided valid responses for analysis; the mean age was 64.8 ± 8.6 years. For best–worst scaling, ‘major illness of family member’ (mean best‐minus‐worst score = 128) was rated the most stressful, and ‘sexual difficulties’ was rated the least stressful (mean best‐minus‐worst score = −153). For the rating scale, ‘major personal illness’ was rated the most stressful (mean rating = 6.95), and ‘sexual difficulties’ was again the least stressful (mean rating = 2.05). Rankings of events based on both methods were similar but were different from ratings based on the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Conclusion The current study explored using BWS to estimate the magnitude of stressful life events. The magnitude of events estimated in our study was found to differ from the magnitude estimated previously by some common scales for assessing stressful life events.