Level of Evidence in Orthopaedic Journals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The American edition of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS-A) has included a level-of-evidence rating for each of its clinical scientific papers published since January 2003. The purpose of this study was to assess the type and level of evidence found in nine different orthopaedic journals by applying this level-of-evidence rating system. METHODS: We reviewed all clinical articles published from January through June 2003 in nine orthopaedic journals. Studies of animals, studies of cadavera, basic-science articles, review articles, case reports, and expert opinions were excluded. The remaining 382 clinical articles were randomly assigned to three experienced reviewers and two inexperienced reviewers, who rated them with the JBJS-A grading system. Each reviewer determined whether the studies were therapeutic, prognostic, diagnostic, or economic, and each rated the level of evidence as I, II, III, or IV. Reviewers were blinded to the grades assigned by the other reviewers. RESULTS: According to the reviewers' ratings, 70.7% of the articles were therapeutic, 19.9% were prognostic, 8.9% were diagnostic, and 0.5% were economic. The reviewers graded 11.3% as Level I, 20.7% as Level II, 9.9% as Level III, and 58.1% as Level IV. The kappa values for the interobserver agreement between the experienced reviewers and the inexperienced reviewers were 0.62 for the level of evidence and 0.76 for the study type. The kappa values for the interobserver agreement between the experienced reviewers were 0.75 for the level of evidence and 0.85 for the study type. The kappa values for the agreement between the reviewers' grades and the JBJS-A grades were 0.84 for the level of evidence and 1.00 for the study type. All kappa values were significantly different from zero (p < 0.0001 for all). The percentage of articles that were rated Level I or II increased in accordance with the 2003 journal impact factors for the individual journals (p = 0.0061). CONCLUSIONS: Orthopaedic journals with a higher impact factor are more likely to publish Level-I or II articles. The type and level of information in orthopaedic journals can be reliably classified, and clinical investigators should pursue studies with a higher level of evidence whenever feasible.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | MetaresearchBibliometrics Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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 | 0.020 | 0.149 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.125 | 0.060 |
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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".