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Record W4411349279 · doi:10.11124/jbies-24-00523

The revised JBI critical appraisal tool for the assessment of risk of bias for analytical cross-sectional studies

2025· article· en· W4411349279 on OpenAlexaff
Timothy Hugh Barker, Sabira Hasanoff, Edoardo Aromataris, Jennifer Stone, Jo Leonardi‐Bee, Kim Sears, Miloslav Klugar, Cătălin Tufănaru, Sandeep Moola, Xian‐Liang Liu, Zachary Munn

Bibliographic record

VenueJBI Evidence Synthesis · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicMeta-analysis and systematic reviews
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCritical appraisalObservational studySystematic reviewCross-sectional studyContext (archaeology)PopulationPsychologyMedicineMEDLINEEnvironmental healthGeographyAlternative medicinePathologyPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Cross-sectional studies are a useful observational study design that provide a snapshot of a population's health status at a specific moment in time. Analytical cross-sectional studies are often included in systematic reviews investigating the etiology or risk of diseases, and descriptive cross-sectional studies are often used to determine the prevalence of a disease. As required of all studies that meet eligibility criteria for a systematic review, analytical cross-sectional studies should be subjected to appropriate critical appraisal of their methodological quality to determine the risk of bias. The JBI Effectiveness Methodology Group is currently undertaking a comprehensive revision of the entire suite of JBI critical appraisal tools to align with recent advances in risk of bias assessment. This paper presents the revised critical appraisal tool for risk of bias assessment of analytical cross-sectional studies. Applying tools such as the revised JBI tools within systematic reviews allows end users to make informed decisions using the evidence. We discuss major changes from the previous iterations of this tool and justify these changes within the context of the broader advancements to risk-of-bias assessment science. We also offer practical guidance for the use of this revised tool, and provide examples for interpreting the results of risk-of-bias assessment for analytical cross-sectional studies to support reviewers including these studies in their systematic reviews.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.601
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.857
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.399
Threshold uncertainty score0.492

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.6010.857
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0090.008
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0170.036
Bibliometrics0.0460.035
Science and technology studies0.0050.012
Scholarly communication0.0200.013
Open science0.0120.016
Research integrity0.0120.026
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0310.012

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 head0.595
GPT teacher head0.621
Teacher spread0.026 · 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

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
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

Citations65
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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