MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4408875896 · doi:10.1136/bmj-2024-081199

Development of ROBUST-RCT: Risk Of Bias instrument for Use in SysTematic reviews-for Randomised Controlled Trials

2025· article· en· W4408875896 on OpenAlexaff
Ying Wang, Sheri A. Keitz, Matthias Briel, Paul Glasziou, Romina Brignardello-Petersen, Reed Siemieniuk, Dena Zeraatkar, Elie A. Akl, Susan Armijo‐Olivo, Dirk Bassler, Carrol Gamble, Lise Lotte Gluud, Jane L. Hutton, Luz María Letelier S, Philippe Ravaud, Kenneth F. Schulz, David Torgerson, Gordon Guyatt

Bibliographic record

VenueBMJ · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicMeta-analysis and systematic reviews
Canadian institutionsUniversity of AlbertaMcMaster UniversityImpact
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRandomized controlled trialSystematic reviewMedicineComputer scienceMEDLINEMedical physicsSurgeryBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Recent innovations in evidence based medicine methods, in particular instruments assessing risk of bias in randomised trials, have focused on methodological rigour at the expense of simplicity and practicability. Such a focus could lead to challenges in application and loss of reliability of instruments. To deal with these shortcomings, the Risk Of Bias instrument for Use in SysTematic reviews-for Randomised Controlled Trials (ROBUST-RCT) was created—a rigorously developed, simply structured, and user friendly instrument for assessing risk of bias of randomised controlled trials included in systematic reviews. This paper describes the development of ROBUST-RCT and provides associated documents and a manual of instructions.

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

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 armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaMetaresearch
Domain: Methods · Genre: Methods
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Not applicablelow
gptMetaresearch
Domain: Methods · Genre: Methods
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Other designhigh
models splitAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.624
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.723
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (broad)
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Randomized trial · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.477
Threshold uncertainty score0.992

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.6240.723
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0230.006
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.859
GPT teacher head0.552
Teacher spread0.307 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Metaresearch

The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.

Study designNot applicable · Other design
DomainMethods
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations38
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueBMJSame topicMeta-analysis and systematic reviewsCategoryMetaresearchFrench-language works237,207