ArticleBMC medical research methodology2024
A comprehensive guide to study the agreement and reliability of multi-observer ordinal data.
Article in BMC medical research methodology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Parent-child agreement in reporting somatic distress, gastrointestinal symptoms, mental health, and general health in girls with functional abdominal pain.European journal of pediatrics · 2025Trial
- Rapid progression of diffuse alveolar damage in ARDS: temporal alignment, composite phenotype, and physiological interpretation.Journal of intensive care · 2026Article
- Response-time process signals for selective escalation in reduced-item mental health symptom screening.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Rapid and simultaneous detection ofFrontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Measuring Agreement in Diagnostics: A Practical Guide for Researchers.Statistics in medicine · 2025Article
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.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundA recent systematic review revealed issues in regard to performing and reporting agreement and reliability studies for ordinal scales, especially in the presence of more than two observers. This paper therefore aims to provide all necessary information in regard to the choice among the most meaningful and most used measures and the planning of agreement and reliability studies for ordinal outcomes.
methodsThis paper considers the generalisation of the proportion of (dis)agreement, the mean absolute deviation, the mean squared deviation and weighted kappa coefficients to more than two observers in the presence of an ordinal outcome.
resultsAfter highlighting the difference between the concepts of agreement and reliability, a clear and simple interpretation of the agreement and reliability coefficients is provided. The large sample variance of the various coefficients with the delta method is presented or derived if not available in the literature to construct Wald confidence intervals. Finally, a procedure to determine the minimum number of raters and patients needed to limit the uncertainty associated with the sampling process is provided. All the methods are available in an R package and a Shiny application to circumvent the limitations of current software.
conclusionsThe present paper completes existing guidelines, such as the Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies (GRRAS), to improve the quality of reliability and agreement studies of clinical tests. Furthermore, we provide open source software to researchers with minimum programming skills.
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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.