Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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Meta Analysis
Methodological assessment of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on COVID-19: A meta-epidemiological study.
COVID-19 has caused an ongoing public health crisis. Many systematic reviews and meta-analyses have been performed to synthesize evidence for better understanding this new disease. However, some concerns have been raised about rapid COVID-19 research. This meta-epidemiological study aims to methodologically assess the current systematic reviews and meta-analyses on COVID-19. ⋯ The current systematic reviews and meta-analyses on COVID-19 might suffer from low transparency, high heterogeneity, and suboptimal statistical methods. It is recommended that future systematic reviews on COVID-19 strictly follow well-developed guidelines. Sensitivity analyses may be performed to examine how the synthesized evidence might depend on different methods for appraising evidence, assessing publication bias, and implementing meta-analysis models.