ArticleBMC medical research methodology2018
A systematic survey shows that reporting and handling of missing outcome data in networks of interventions is poor.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 23 citations in OpenAlex.
- Compliance of systematic reviews and meta-analyses in ophthalmology with the PRISMA statement: an AI-based assessment and longitudinal comparison with 2017 data.BMC medical research methodology · 2026Article
- Low awareness of the transitivity assumption in complex networks of interventions: a systematic survey from 721 network meta-analyses.BMC medicine · 2024Article
- How robust are findings of pairwise and network meta-analysis in the presence of missing participant outcome data?BMC medicine · 2021Article
- Continuous(ly) missing outcome data in network meta-analysis: A one-stage pattern-mixture model approach.Statistical methods in medical research · 2021Article
- Comparison of exclusion, imputation and modelling of missing binary outcome data in frequentist network meta-analysis.BMC medical research methodology · 2020Article
- Participants' outcomes gone missing within a network of interventions: Bayesian modeling strategies.Statistics in medicine · 2019Article
- An empirical comparison of Bayesian modelling strategies for missing binary outcome data in network meta-analysis.BMC medical research methodology · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundTo provide empirical evidence about prevalence, reporting and handling of missing outcome data in systematic reviews with network meta-analysis and acknowledgement of their impact on the conclusions.
methodsWe conducted a systematic survey including all published systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials comparing at least three interventions from January 1, 2009 until March 31, 2017.
resultsWe retrieved 387 systematic reviews with network meta-analysis. Description of missing outcome data was available in 63 reviews. Intention-to-treat analysis was the most prevalent method (71%), followed by missing outcome data investigated as secondary outcome (e.g., acceptability) (40%). Bias due to missing outcome data was evaluated in half the reviews with explicit judgments in 18 (10%) reviews. Only 88 reviews interpreted their results acknowledging the implications of missing outcome data and mostly using the network meta-analysis results on missing outcome data as secondary outcome. We were unable to judge the actual strategy applied to deal with missing outcome data in 65% of the reviews due to insufficient information. Six percent of network meta-analyses were re-analyzed in sensitivity analysis considering missing outcome data, while 4% explicitly justified the strategy for dealing with missing outcome data.
conclusionsThe description and handling of missing outcome data as well as the acknowledgment of their implications for the conclusions from network meta-analysis are deemed underreported.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.