Abstract
Introduction
Clinical trial registry searches for unpublished clinical trial data are a means of
mitigating publication bias within systematic reviews (SRs). The purpose of our study
is to look at the rate of clinical trial registry searches conducted by SRs in the
top five Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery journals.
Methods
We identified the top five plastic and reconstructive surgery journals using the Google
h-5 index. We then searched Pubmed for SRs published in these journals and compared
them to plastic surgery SRs published in the Cochrane Collaboration for SRs over the
last 5 y. We included all SRs that were published within these top five journals and
Cochrane between December 6, 2016 and December 6, 2021. We then conducted a secondary
analysis on clinicaltrials.gov looking for unpublished clinical trials for 100 randomized
SRs that did not conduct a clinical trial registry search.
Results
In SRs, 3.3% (17/512) from plastic surgery journals conducted trial registry searches.
In comparison, 95.0% (38/40) of Cochrane Collaboration SRs conducted trial registry
searches. Our secondary analysis found that 50% (50/100) of SRs could have included
at least one unpublished clinical trial data set.
Conclusions
We found that plastic surgery SRs rarely include searches for unpublished clinical
trial data in clinical trial registries. To improve the data completeness of SRs in
plastic surgery journals, we recommend journals alter their author guidelines to require
a clinical trial registry search for unpublished literature.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 20, 2023
Accepted:
February 18,
2023
Received in revised form:
December 23,
2022
Received:
November 30,
2022
Identification
Copyright
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