Evidence map›Paper›PMID 30377437›Full record

ArticleJournal of occupational medicine and toxicology (London, England)2018

Work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in osteoarthritis - are they adequately reported in journal publications? A systematic review.

Daniel Sowah, Flora Balat, Sebastian Straube

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of occupational medicine and toxicology (London, England), 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
0.4field-weighted citation impact, top 34% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

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.

2 · The registry

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.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed, 2 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.

Daniel SowahDivision of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, 5-30 University Terrace, 8303-112 Street, Edmonton, AB T6G 2T4 Canada.
Flora BalatDivision of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, 5-30 University Terrace, 8303-112 Street, Edmonton, AB T6G 2T4 Canada.
Sebastian StraubeDivision of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Alberta, 5-30 University Terrace, 8303-112 Street, Edmonton, AB T6G 2T4 Canada.ORCID 0000-0001-7862-0398
University of Alberta · CA

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

backgroundOsteoarthritis (OA) has a high prevalence in Western societies and can affect an individual's life in a number of domains, including work. In our experience, treatment trials on OA, however, rarely report work-related outcomes. Here we conducted a systematic review to assess the reporting of work-related outcomes in randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials in OA. Our systematic review also compared two search strategies for identifying eligible publications, one where work-related terms were included in the database search string (A) and one where this was not the case and work-related outcomes were identified by searches of full text Portable Document Formats (PDFs) (B). Search strategy A would conventionally be used and would only identify publications where work-related terms were mentioned in the title or abstract. Search strategy B presents the innovation of full text PDF searching and would identify publications were work-related terms were reported in the full text, regardless of whether they are mentioned in the title and abstract or not. We hypothesize that search strategy B identifies more relevant publications than search strategy A.

methodsElectronic database searching was performed in Medline (Pubmed) from database inception to February 23, 2017 to identify peer-reviewed articles of randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled treatment trials in OA of the hand, hip, or knee, available as full-text PDFs. For search strategy A, search terms to identify work-related outcomes were included in the database search string, while search strategy B did not have these terms included in the database search string, but instead involved full text PDF searching. We included English language articles only and only those articles where searchable PDFs were available, to enable a comparison between search strategies A and B. Additionally, included studies also needed to report on pain intensity in relation to the work-related outcomes.

resultsSearch strategy A yielded 50 hits combined for hand, hip or knee OA that mentioned some work-related concept in the title or abstract; 12 articles had to be excluded because they were not available as searchable PDFs. Screening of the remaining 38 articles resulted in only two articles that satisfied our inclusion criteria. Search strategy B yielded 986 hits, out of which 201 articles were excluded because searchable full text PDFs were not available. PDF full text searching and further screening resulted in 10 articles that were considered eligible for our review.

conclusionsWork-related outcomes are rarely reported in journal publication on randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trials of hand, hip or knee OA. Searching full text PDFs yields more eligible articles than searching titles and abstracts only.

Indexed as

OsteoarthritisSearch strategiesSystematic reviewTreatment trialsWork-related health outcomes

Identifiers

PMID30377437
PMCPMC6195965
OpenAlexW2897284081

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.