The <scp>AMSTAR</scp>‐2 critical appraisal tool and editorial decision‐making for systematic reviews: Retrospective, bibliometric study
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract AMSTAR‐2 is a critical appraisal instrument for systematic reviews and may have a role in editorial processes. This study explored whether associations exist between AMSTAR‐2 assessments and editorial decisions. A retrospective, cross‐sectional study of manuscripts submitted to a single journal between 2015 and 2017 was undertaken. All submissions that reported an eligible systematic review were assessed using AMSTAR‐2 by two assessors. Inter‐rater agreement (IRR) was calculated for all AMSTAR‐2 items. Associations between AMSTAR‐2 assessments and the editorial decision, final publication status in any journal, and measures of impact were explored. One hundred and twenty‐two manuscripts were included. Across all AMSTAR‐2 items, the IRR varied from 0.03 (slight agreement) to 0.82 (substantial agreement). All submissions contained at least two critical methodological weaknesses. There was no difference in the number of weaknesses (median: 4; IQR: 3–5 vs. median: 4; IQR: 3.5–4.5; p = 0.482) between accepted and rejected submissions. Neither was there a difference between rejected submissions published elsewhere and those which remained unpublished (median: 4; IQR: 3.5–4.5 vs. median: 4; IQR: 4.5–5; p = 0.103). The number of weaknesses was not associated with academic impact. There was no association with AMSTAR‐2 assessments and editorial outcomes. Further work is required to explore whether the instrument can be prospectively operationalized for use during editorial processes.
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.
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 | high |
| gpt | MetaresearchBibliometrics Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | high |
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 | 0.439 | 0.927 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.054 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.035 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it