Levels of Evidence at the Orthopaedic Trauma Association Annual Meetings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To examine the strength of evidence presented at the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA) annual meetings before and after the level of evidence guidelines became popular in the literature. DATA SOURCES: 10 years of abstracts from OTA podium presentations, preguidelines (1998-2002), and postguidelines (2007-2011). STUDY SELECTION: All abstracts were blinded and randomized for review. Only therapeutic, diagnostic, prognostic, and economic study types were included. DATA EXTRACTION: Study type and level of evidence were determined for each abstract. DATA SYNTHESIS: Five hundred thirteen abstracts were included, primarily consisting of therapeutic studies (63%). The distribution of study types between the pre- and postguideline periods was similar (P = 0.37). The levels of evidence for podium presentations in the preguideline period were as follows: level I, 10%; level II, 16%; level III, 14%; and level IV, 60%. The distribution in the postguideline period was as follows: level I, 13%; level II, 2%; level III, 29%; and level IV, 36%. The differences between the pre- and postguideline presentations were significant (P < 0.0001), indicating an improvement in the strength of evidence presented at the annual meetings. CONCLUSIONS: The majority of podium presentations at the OTA annual meetings are level IV studies; however, there has been a measurable decrease in the number of uncontrolled case series presented at more recent meetings. Encouraging reporting of levels of evidence at future annual meetings has the potential to positively influence the orthopaedic trauma community by improving readers' understanding of the strength of evidence presented, the study design hierarchy, and encouraging investigators to conduct controlled study designs when possible.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.025 | 0.161 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.089 | 0.033 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".