Searching clinical trial registries in interventional physical therapy systematic reviews: A Pilot Cross-sectional Analysis
Author and article information
Abstract
Background. Studies with positive findings are more likely to be published compared to those with negative findings. Therefore the latter studies are often disregarded in systematic reviews. This causes an overestimation of a treatment effect size which leads to a misinterpretation of the evidence. Searching clinical trial registries in systematic reviews is a useful source to retrieve unpublished clinical trials leading to the reduction of publication bias. Previous studies in the literature reported inconsistent searching of clinical trial registries in systematic reviews published in several medical fields. Searching clinical trial registries in physical therapy is still unknown. The aim of this cross-sectional analysis is to evaluate the extent of clinical trial registry searching in physical therapy interventional systematic reviews.
Methods. Systematic reviews published between January 2017 and January 2018 were retrieved from five reputable physical therapy journals. Interventional systematic reviews that were coherent with the inclusion criteria were included in the analysis.
Results. The search yielded 40 systematic reviews. Among these 19 were interventional systematic reviews as well as being consistent with the inclusion criteria and thus were considered for the analysis. After reviewing their search methodology, only two reviews (10.5%) reported searching at least one clinical trial registry.
Discussion. The results of this study suggest poor searching of clinical trial registries in physical therapy systematic reviews. Due to the limitations of this study, further research analyzing large samples of interventional physical therapy systematic reviews is required.
Cite this as
2018. Searching clinical trial registries in interventional physical therapy systematic reviews: A Pilot Cross-sectional Analysis. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26981v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26981v1Author comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
Sections
Additional Information
Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Alaa Abou Khzam conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The raw data/code is included in the manuscript (figure 1 in the main file).
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
