Presentation approaches for enhancing interpretability of patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in meta-analysis: a protocol for a systematic survey of Cochrane reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Meta-analyses of clinical trials often provide sufficient information for decision-makers to evaluate whether chance can explain apparent differences between interventions. Interpretation of the magnitude and importance of treatment effects beyond statistical significance can, however, be challenging, particularly for patient-reported outcomes (PROs) measured using questionnaires with which clinicians have limited familiarity. The objectives of our study are to systematically evaluate Cochrane systematic review authors' approaches to calculation, reporting and interpretation of pooled estimates of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in meta-analyses. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We will conduct a methodological survey of a random sample of Cochrane systematic reviews published from 1 January 2015 to 1 April 2017 that report at least one statistically significant pooled result for at least one PRO in the abstract. Author pairs will independently review all titles, abstracts and full texts identified by the literature search, and they will extract data using a standardised data extraction form. We will extract the following: year of publication, number of included trials, number of included participants, clinical area, type of intervention(s) and control(s), type of meta-analysis and use of the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach to rate the quality of evidence, as well as information regarding the characteristics of PROMs, calculation and presentation of PROM effect estimates and interpretation of PROM effect estimates. We will document and summarise the methods used for the analysis, reporting and interpretation of each summary effect measure. We will summarise categorical variables with frequencies and percentages and continuous outcomes as means and/or medians and associated measures of dispersion. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethics approval for this study is not required. We will disseminate the results of this review in peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations.
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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 | 0.397 | 0.620 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.015 | 0.030 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.035 | 0.034 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.095 | 0.026 |
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".