Evaluating characteristics of PROSPERO records as predictors of eventual publication of non-Cochrane systematic reviews: a meta-epidemiological study protocol

The objective of this study is to explore which factors are associated with a higher probability that results derived from a non-Cochrane PROSPERO registration record for a systematic review will be finally reported as an original article in a scientific journal.Methods/designThe PROSPERO repository will be web scraped to automatically and iteratively obtain all completed non-Cochrane registration records stored from February 2011 to December 2017. Downloaded records will be screened, and those with less than 90% fulfilled or are duplicated (i.e., those sharing titles and reviewers) will be excluded. Manual and human-supervised automatic methods will be used for data extraction, depending on the data source (fields of PROSPERO registration records, bibliometric databases, etc.). Records will be classified intopublished,discontinued, andabandoned review subgroups. All articles derived frompublished reviews will be obtained through multiple parallel searches using the full protocol “title” and/or “list reviewers” in MEDLINE/PubMed databases and Google Scholar. Reviewer, author, article, and journal metadata will be obtained using different sources. R and Python programming and analysis languages will be used to describe the datasets; perform text mining, machine learni ng, and deep learning analyses; and visualize the data. We will report the study according to the recommendations for meta-epidemiological studies adapted from the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic...
Source: Systematic Reviews - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research