Methodological quality of studies of end-stage renal disease risks in lupus nephritis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Variations in methodological quality can affect the results of individual studies and of systematic reviews. We examined the adequacy of patient descriptions, representativeness, and follow-up information in studies included in a systematic review of risks of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in patients with lupus nephritis. We search Medline, Embase, and the Cochrane Database from their inceptions to 31 December 2013 for studies that reported on ESRD in adults with lupus nephritis. We included all observational studies and long-term clinical trials with a minimum of 12 months of follow-up and 10 patients that reported specific data on the development of ESRD. Two authors independently assessed study quality using a modification of the Newcastle Ottawa scale, and rated studies on 10 items in three areas: adequacy of description of the cohort (items 1 to 3); representativeness (items 4 to 7); and adequacy of follow-up information (items 8 to 10). The literature search yielded 1,852 articles, of which 174 articles met our inclusion criteria. These included 132 observational studies and 42 clinical trials. The proportion of studies meeting each quality measure, stratified by study design, is presented in Table 1 . Among observational studies, the median number of measures satisfied per study was 5 (range 2 to 9), and among clinical trials was 4 (range 2 to 7). There was no correlation between publication year and number of measures satisfied for observational studies ( r = 0.14), but recent trials tended to satisfy more quality measures ( r = 0.32; P = 0.04). While both observational studies and clinical trials generally provided good clinical descriptions of the cohorts, few provided adequate data on follow-up. The representativeness of observational studies was low. The improvement in trial quality over time may be due to the development of standardized protocols and the institution of reporting standards, which might also serve to enhance the reporting of observational studies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.553 | 0.774 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.018 | 0.022 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.032 | 0.034 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".