From: Rethinking the assessment of risk of bias due to selective reporting: a cross-sectional study
Reason | Number (%a) of 1055 studies |
---|---|
Concerns about outcome non-reporting bias | 819 (78) |
Not all of the study’s pre-specified outcomes have been reported | 387 (37) |
One or more outcomes of interest in the review are partially reported so that they cannot be entered in a meta-analysis | 364 (35) |
The study report fails to include results for a key outcome that would be expected to have been reported for such a study | 188 (18) |
Concerns about the documents available for assessment (e.g. no protocol was available or the only available report is a conference abstract) | 59 (6) |
Concerns about reporting of only a subset of measurements, analysis methods or subsets of the data that were pre-specified (e.g. data were reported for only some of the pre-specified time points) | 58 (6) |
Concerns about post-hoc reporting of outcomes, measurements, analysis methods or subsets of the data (e.g. one or more reported outcomes were not pre-specified in a protocol or trial registry) | 56 (5) |
Concerns about how outcome data were analysed (e.g. a continuous/ordinal outcome was dichotomised or adjusted effect estimates were not reported) | 28 (3) |
Concerns about discrepant reporting (e.g. outcome data differed across multiple reports for a particular study) | 9 (1) |
Other concerns (e.g. only adverse events occurring in at least 5 % of participants were reported, trialists emphasised statistically significant results even though these were less relevant/secondary outcomes) | 31 (3) |
Concerns that are not relevant to the selective reporting domain (e.g. not all randomised participants were analysed, baseline data were not reported, blinding of participants was unclear) | 73 (7) |
Unclear reason (e.g. stated that “All pre-specified outcomes were reported” or no reason stated) | 69 (7) |