Abstract
ABSTRACTObjective:To carry out a scoping review of the meta-analyses published regarding about coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), evaluating their main characteristics, publication trends and methodological quality.Methods:A bibliometric search was performed in PubMed®, Scopus and Web of Science, focusing on meta-analyses about COVID-2019 disease. Bibliometric and descriptive data for the included articles were extracted and the methodological quality of the included meta-analyses was evaluated using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews.Results:A total of 348 meta-analyses were considered eligible. The first meta-analysis about COVID-19 disease was published on February 26, 2020, and the number of meta-analyses has grown rapidly since then. Most of them were published in infectious disease and virology journals. The greatest number come from China, followed by the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom. On average, these meta-analyses included 23 studies and 15,200 participants. Overall quality was remarkably low, and only 8.9% of them could be considered as of high confidence level.Conclusion:Although well-designed meta-analyses about COVID-19 disease have already been published, the majority are of low quality. Thus, all stakeholders playing a role in COVID-19 deseases, including policy makers, researchers, publishers and journals, should prioritize well-designed meta-analyses, performed only when the background information seem suitable, and discouraging those of low quality or that use suboptimal methods.
Highlights
Since coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was recognized as a serious public health threat, researchers from all over the world have devoted a great deal of time and effort to characterize and understand this new disease, resulting in an unprecedented surge in the number of publications.[1,2,3] On average, more than 200 new articles about COVID-19 have been indexed in PubMed®, every day.[4]
Six main exclusion criteria were applied: articles published before 2019; protocols of systematic reviews and meta-analyses; research designs other than meta-analyses; meta-analyses not related to COVID-19; meta-analyses for which data came from sources other than previously published articles, and articles for which the full text could not be found
The overall number of meta-analyses being published has increased considerably in recent years,(21) and this mass publication of meta-analyses has been heavily criticized.[22,23] Among the main problems relating to the increased number of meta-analyses being published are duplicated efforts, conflicting results, low quality and limited practical value.[22]. While our study focused on an analysis of the quality of the studies, one might expect these same problems are present in COVID-19-related meta-analyses
Summary
All stakeholders involved in academic research and scientific publishing have directed efforts to enable an efficient publication outflow: governments and supporting agencies are releasing special funding and grants for research about COVID-19; ethics committees and other regulatory agencies are prioritizing COVID-19-related projects;(5) publishers are applying open access policies to COVID-19 articles; and journals are reviewing COVID-19 articles using fast-track processes.[6,7] All these efforts have the ultimate goal of enhancing knowledge and generating evidence about COVID-19. Not surprisingly, meta-analyses regarding COVID-19 are already being published Prompted by this remarkable and constant growth in publication output, a discussion in respect of the quality and ethical standards of these articles has already begun.[6,8,9,10]. In order to quantify the problem and foresee potential drawbacks in the evidence synthesis of COVID-19 research, it is important to quantify the amount of meta-analyses being published, their characteristics, their methods and the average quality of these reports
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