Evaluating characteristics of PROSPERO records as predictors of eventual publication of non-Cochrane systematic reviews: a meta-epidemiological study protocol

Abstract

BackgroundEpidemiology and the reporting characteristics of systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MAs) are well known. However, no study has analyzed the influence of protocol features on the probability that a study’s results will be finally reported, thereby indirectly assessing the reporting bias of International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) registration records.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to explore which factors are associated with a higher probability that results derived from a non-Cochrane PROSPERO registration record for a systematic review will be finally reported as an original article in a scientific journal.Methods/designThe PROSPERO repository will be web scraped to automatically and iteratively obtain all completed non-Cochrane registration records stored from February 2011 to December 2017. Downloaded records will be screened, and those with less than 90% fulfilled or are duplicated (i.e., those sharing titles and reviewers) will be excluded. Manual and human-supervised automatic methods will be used for data extraction, depending on the data source (fields of PROSPERO registration records, bibliometric databases, etc.). Records will be classified into published, discontinued, and abandoned review subgroups. All articles derived from published reviews will be obtained through multiple parallel searches using the full protocol “title” and/or “list reviewers” in MEDLINE/PubMed databases and Google Scholar. Reviewer, author, article, and journal metadata will be obtained using different sources. R and Python programming and analysis languages will be used to describe the datasets; perform text mining, machine learning, and deep learning analyses; and visualize the data. We will report the study according to the recommendations for meta-epidemiological studies adapted from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement for SRs and MAs.DiscussionThis meta-epidemiological study will explore, for the first time, characteristics of PROSPERO records that may be associated with the publication of a completed systematic review. The evidence may help to improve review workflow performance in terms of research topic selection, decision-making regarding team selection, planning relationships with funding sources, implementing literature search strategies, and efficient data extraction and analysis. We expect to make our results, datasets, and R and Python code scripts publicly available during the third quarter of 2018.

Protocol registration issues of systematic review and meta-analysis studies: a survey of global researchers

“…So, is it fair that someone keeps the idea forever for just thinking about it?. (27) A recent study by Tsujimoto et al reported that around 26% of protocols registered in PROSPERO remained unpublished 5.4 years after registration. (28) Further, they reported that funding for SRs was a determining factor in the publication status of registered SRs.…”

Protocol registration issues of systematic review and meta-analysis studies: a survey of global researchers

“…The questionnaire was composed of 38 items divided into the following sections: 1) demographic and professional information about authors (items 1-8): age, gender, author's work country, years of experience in the SR/MA eld, elds of interest, number of published SR/MA, the highest impact factor and their roles in research studies, 2) SR/MA registration (items 9-19): databases for SR/MA protocol registration, the proportion of registered SR/MA, proportion of registered SR/MA protocols that was not published, opinions about the reason for not registering SR/MA, reason for not publishing registered SR/MA and information about protocol registration process, 3) opinions regarding registration protocol and problem of duplication (items [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. At the end of the questionnaire, we added an open-ended question to gather further opinions regarding the protocol registration process, which were not covered with our previous questions.…”

Partially systematic thoughts on the history of systematic reviews

“…A total of 200 reviews were registered in PROSPERO’s first 8 months, and it was warmly welcomed by Sally Davies, Director of the UK’s National Institute for Health Research [ 28 ]. By August 2018, nearly 40,000 ongoing reviews had been registered, growing by more than 10,000 per year, and methodology research is beginning to appear which uses these records [ 29 , 30 ]. Finally, individual reviews themselves are now being subject to combination in overviews bringing together the findings of multiple reviews [ 31 ] and greater automation in the review process looks set to accelerate further both the number of reviews and the speed with which they are done [ 32 – 34 ].…”