Is the information of systematic reviews published in nursing journals up-to-date? a cross-sectional study

Abstract

BackgroundAn up-to-date systematic review is important for researchers to decide whether to embark on new research or continue supporting ongoing studies. The aim of this study is to examine the time taken between the last search, submission, acceptance and publication dates of systematic reviews published in nursing journals.MethodsNursing journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports were first identified. Thereafter, systematic reviews published in these journals in 2014 were extracted from three databases. The quality of the systematic reviews were evaluated by the AMSTAR. The last search, submission, acceptance, online publication, full publication dates and other characteristics of the systematic reviews were recorded. The time taken between the five dates was then computed. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the time differences; non-parametric statistics were used to examine the association between the time taken from the last search and full publication alongside other potential factors, including the funding support, submission during holiday periods, number of records retrieved from database, inclusion of meta-analysis, and quality of the review.ResultsA total of 107 nursing journals were included in this study, from which 1070 articles were identified through the database search. After screening for eligibility, 202 systematic reviews were included in the analysis. The quality of these reviews was low with the median score of 3 out of 11. A total of 172 (85.1%), 72 (35.6%), 153 (75.7%) and 149 (73.8%) systematic reviews provided their last search, submission, acceptance and online published dates respectively. The median numbers of days taken from the last search to acceptance and to full publication were, respectively, 393 (IQR: 212–609) and 669 (427–915) whereas that from submission to full publication was 365 (243–486). Moreover, the median number of days from the last search to submission and from submission to online publication were 167.5 (53.5–427) and 153 (92–212), respectively. No significant association were revealed between the time lag and those potential factors.ConclusionThe median time from the last search to acceptance for systematic reviews published in nursing journals was 393 days. Readers for systematic reviews are advised to check the time taken from the last search date of the reviews in order to ensure that up-to-date evidence is consulted for effective clinical decision-making.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12874-017-0432-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Perception of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement of authors publishing reviews in nursing journals: a cross-sectional online survey

“…Therefore, a clear description of the sources for searching and selection procedure is essential. A recent study reported that all systematic reviews published in nursing journals revealed the databases used and at least 85.1% provided the last searched date 12. Tam et al 12 further reported that the rates of compliance to Items 7, 9 and 17 were 98.6%, 97.3% and 91.9%, respectively among systematic reviews published in nursing journals.…”

“…A search was conducted on the PubMed database for articles published in these 116 journals between 1 January 2011 and 15 December 2017 with ‘review’ or ‘meta-analysis’ in their titles. We used ‘review’ rather than ‘systematic review’ as the searching term to be more inclusive because prior studies have indicated that some systematic reviews published in nursing journals might use other terms such as ‘systematic literature review’ in the title 12. A noteworthy difference between systematic reviews and traditional literature/narrative reviews is that the former requires predefined criteria for eligibility, systematic search strategy, quality assessment and synthesis of results, whereas the latter does not.…”

Overview of reviews of standardised occupation‐based instruments for use in occupational therapy practice

“…() were more lenient in their pre‐defined criteria on psychometric properties included and did not always use a quality checklist. Systematic review is known to compile evidence from previous literature making the evidence dated (Tam, Lo, Khalechelvam, Seah, & Goh, ). Therefore, some psychometric properties may have been under‐reported.…”

“…Some systematic reviews such as Rainey et al (2014) imposed strict criteria and used standardised quality checklists whereas some systematic reviews such as Tse et al (2013) were more lenient in their pre-defined criteria on psychometric properties included and did not always use a quality checklist. Systematic review is known to compile evidence from previous literature making the evidence dated (Tam, Lo, Khalechelvam, Seah, & Goh, 2017). Therefore, some psychometric properties may have been under-reported.…”

Exploring pedagogies used in undergraduate mental health nursing curriculum: An Integrative Literature Review

“…Initial coding and categorization of the studies were then performed for data abstraction, followed by summarizing them into an integrated conclusion (Cooper, 1989). These were subsequently discussed with other authors, when content analysis was used to identify the keywords (Whittemore and Knafl, 2005, Tam et al, 2017). These steps were strictly maintained throughout the review to prevent any loss of valuable insights (Tam et al, 2019).…”