The impact of different inclusion decisions on the comprehensiveness and complexity of overviews of reviews of healthcare interventions

Table 3 Summary table: amount of outcome data included in each overview when comparing different inclusion scenarios

	Full scenario vs. restricted scenario 1	Restricted scenario 2 vs. 1	Restricted scenario 2 vs. 3	Restricted scenario 2 vs. 4	Restricted scenario 4 vs. 3
Overviews for which Cochrane SRs examined all relevant intervention comparisons
Bronchiolitis	More	Same	Same	Same	Same
Croup	Same	Same	Same	Same	Same
Gastroenteritis	More	Same	More	Same	More
Overviews for which Cochrane SRs did not examine all relevant intervention comparisons
Acute asthma	More	More	More	Same	More
Acute otitis media	More	More	Similar	Unknown	Unknown
Eczema	More	More	More	Unknown	Unknown
Procedural sedation	More	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown

Full scenario: include all Cochrane and non-Cochrane SRs; restricted scenario 1: include only Cochrane SRs; restricted scenarios 2–4: include all non-overlapping SRs, and in the case of overlapping SRs include the Cochrane SR (restricted scenario 2), the most recent SR (restricted scenario 3), or the highest quality SR (restricted scenario 4). “More” means that more outcome data were included in the first-listed vs. second-listed scenario; “same” means that the same amount of outcome data were included in both scenarios; “similar” means that the same amount of outcome data were included in both scenarios, but the breakdowns differed across primary, secondary, and adverse effects outcomes; “unknown” means that we were unable to calculate the amount of outcome data

ISSN: 2046-4053