ArticleBMC medical research methodology2017
Inter-rater reliability of AMSTAR is dependent on the pair of reviewers.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Assessor burden, inter-rater agreement and user experience of the RoB-SPEO tool for assessing risk of bias in studies estimating prevalence of exposure to occupational risk factors: An analysis from the WHO/ILO Joint Estimates of the Work-related Burden of Disease and Injury.Environment international · 2022Pooled it
- Unreported search comprehensiveness and inter-rater reliability in the systematic review of 3D printing in cochlear implantation.European archives of oto-rhino-laryngology : official journal of the European Federation of Oto-Rhino-Laryngological Societies (EUFOS) : affiliated with the German Society for Oto-Rhino-Laryngology - Head and Neck Surgery · 2026Article
- Widening participation - recruitment methods in mental health randomised controlled trials: a qualitative study.BMC medical research methodology · 2023Article
- Inter-Rater Agreement in Assessing Risk of Bias in Melanoma Prediction Studies Using the Prediction Model Risk of Bias Assessment Tool (PROBAST): Results from a Controlled Experiment on the Effect of Specific Rater Training.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Article
- Declining Quality of Systematic Reviews in Orthopaedic Sports Medicine: An Updated Systematic Review.Arthroscopy, sports medicine, and rehabilitation · 2022Review
- Benefits and concerns associated with blockchain-based health information exchange (HIE): a qualitative study from physicians' perspectives.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2022Article
- Article
- The impact of grey zones on the accuracy of agreement measures for ordinal tables.BMC medical research methodology · 2021Article
- Measuring test-retest reliability (TRR) of AMSTAR provides moderate to perfect agreement - a contribution to the discussion of the importance of TRR in relation to the psychometric properties of assessment tools.BMC medical research methodology · 2021Article
- Figure Interpretation Assessment Tool-Health (FIAT-health) 2.0: from a scoring instrument to a critical appraisal tool.BMC medical research methodology · 2019Article
- Improving the quality of reporting of systematic reviews of dose-response meta-analyses: a cross-sectional survey.BMC medical research methodology · 2018Article
- Evaluation of the reliability, usability, and applicability of AMSTAR, AMSTAR 2, and ROBIS: protocol for a descriptive analytic study.Systematic reviews · 2018Review
- Comparison of methodological quality rating of systematic reviews on neuropathic pain using AMSTAR and R-AMSTAR.BMC medical research methodology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundInter-rater reliability (IRR) is mainly assessed based on only two reviewers of unknown expertise. The aim of this paper is to examine differences in the IRR of the Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) and R(evised)-AMSTAR depending on the pair of reviewers.
methodsFive reviewers independently applied AMSTAR and R-AMSTAR to 16 systematic reviews (eight Cochrane reviews and eight non-Cochrane reviews) from the field of occupational health. Responses were dichotomized and reliability measures were calculated by applying Holsti's method (r) and Cohen's kappa (κ) to all potential pairs of reviewers. Given that five reviewers participated in the study, there were ten possible pairs of reviewers.
resultsInter-rater reliability varied for AMSTAR between r = 0.82 and r = 0.98 (median r = 0.88) using Holsti's method and κ = 0.41 and κ = 0.69 (median κ = 0.52) using Cohen's kappa and for R-AMSTAR between r = 0.77 and r = 0.89 (median r = 0.82) and κ = 0.32 and κ = 0.67 (median κ = 0.45) depending on the pair of reviewers. The same pair of reviewers yielded the highest IRR for both instruments. Pairwise Cohen's kappa reliability measures showed a moderate correlation between AMSTAR and R-AMSTAR (Spearman's ρ =0.50). The mean inter-rater reliability for AMSTAR was highest for item 1 (κ = 1.00) and item 5 (κ = 0.78), while lowest values were found for items 3, 8, 9 and 11, which showed only fair agreement.
conclusionsInter-rater reliability varies widely depending on the pair of reviewers. There may be some shortcomings associated with conducting reliability studies with only two reviewers. Further studies should include additional reviewers and should probably also take account of their level of expertise.
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