Levels of evidence: a comparison between top medical journals and general pediatric journals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Given the large number of publications in all fields of practice, it is essential that clinicians focus on the resources that provide the highest level of evidence (LOE). We sought to determine the LOE that exists in the field of pediatrics, present in the general pediatric as well as high impact clinical literature. METHODS: Clinical pediatric literature, published between April 2011 and March 2012 inclusive in high-impact clinical journals (HICJ) (New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, & The Lancet) and the highest-impact general pediatric journals (GPJ) (Pediatrics, Journal of Pediatrics, & Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine), was assessed. In addition to the LOE, articles were evaluated on criteria including subspecialty within pediatrics, number of authors, number of centers, and other parameters. Eligible level I randomized control trials were appraised using the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) guidelines. RESULTS: Of 6511 articles screened, 804 met inclusion criteria (68 in HICJ and 736 in GPJ). On average, LOE in pediatrics-focused articles within The Lancet were significantly higher than all GPJ (p < 0.05). Average CONSORT scores were significantly higher in HICJ vs. GPJ (15.2 vs. 13.6, respectively, p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: LOE and quality of randomized control trials within the pediatric field is highest within HICJ, however, only represent a small proportion of data published. Following CONSORT criteria, and promoting studies of high LOE may allow authors and readers to turn to journals and articles of greater clinical impact.
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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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.222 | 0.231 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".