A quality assessment of a sample of herbal medicine systematic reviews using R-AMSTAR

Abstract

The numbers of herbal medicine systematic reviews (SR) are increasing, and reviews need to be good quality to inform practice and research. This study assesses the quality of herbal medicine SR and makes recommendations to those reading and writing them. Two open datasets from published meta-reviews were used as a sample, in which R-AMSTAR (Revised Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews) was used to assess the method quality of 94 SR. This scrutinises 11 domains including search strategy, risk of bias and other components, and compiles a score. The datasets were examined in Microsoft Excel.For the herbs studied, the numbers of SRs published had increased over time but quality standards had not altered. Reviews published with specialist groups and those with meta-analyses were higher quality. Overall, some methodological steps were performed well such as article searching. Other steps like pre-registering a protocol and providing a clear basis for selecting articles to assess could be enhanced.To conclude, the quality of SR was variable in this sample, on par with other medical areas. The use of quality assurance tools could help improve authors’ skills, although some aspects of quality assessed were influenced by the complexity of botanical material and herbal medicine.