A survey of prevalence of narrative and systematic reviews in five major medical journals.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Systematic reviews may provide less biased evidence than narrative reviews because they observe a strict methodology, similarly to primary studies. Hence, for clinical research questions, systematic reviews should be the study design of choice. It would be important to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of narrative and systematic reviews published in prominent medical journals. Researchers and clinicians give great value to articles published in such scientific journals. This study sought to evaluate the prevalence and characteristics of narrative and systematic reviews in the five highest-ranked general medical journals and investigate the associations among type of review, number of citations, and impact factor (IF).

Methods

We surveyed the five highes

SUBMITTER: Faggion CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5746017 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature