Abstract
Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are situated at the top of hierarchy of evidence-based medicine, where its number and quality are important in the assessment of quality of evidence in a medical field. In this study, we aim to assess the status of RCTs in Ophthalmology. Methods: On 15 th of May 2019, we performed a PubMed search for randomized controlled trials published in the field of ophthalmology using relevant filters and search terms. We categorized the results into specific topics in ophthalmology according to Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) database classification system. We used Altmetric explorer to identify journals and articles with the highest number of RCTs and highest citations. Results: We found a total of 540,427 publications in the field of ophthalmology, of which only 11,634 (2.15%) of them were RCTs. 'Retinal diseases' was the topic with the highest number of RCTs, followed by 'glaucoma' and 'conjunctival diseases'. The trial with highest number of citations was on retinal diseases. Only around 18% of all ophthalmology RCTs are published in the top 10 ophthalmology journals, with a maximum percentage of RCTs was (5.53%) published in Ophthalmology. Conclusion: RCTs in ophthalmology primarily concern the retina, glaucoma, and a few other sub-topics, with little focus on sclera, orbit, and the eyelids. Most of the high impact RCTs are published in non-ophthalmology journals.
Highlights
Since the conception of the term “evidence-based medicine” in clinical practice in 19921, where well-conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are situated at the top of hierarchy of evidence, there has been an emphasis on accepting high quality evidence in terms of Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in clinical practice
There was a total of 482,791 RCT identified in all disciplines, of which only 2.4% are in the field of ophthalmology
Retinal diseases is the topic with the highest number of RCTs, followed by glaucoma and conjunctival diseases
Summary
Since the conception of the term “evidence-based medicine” in clinical practice in 19921, where well-conducted randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are situated at the top of hierarchy of evidence, there has been an emphasis on accepting high quality evidence in terms of RCTs in clinical practice. Despite the rapid growth in ophthalmology literature in the recent years, this growth has not been paralleled by a growth in the quality of evidence[3] This is evident by the number of Cochrane reviews that don’t include any RCTs (i.e. empty review), which were estimated to be half of the total reviews on Cochrane Eyes and Vision in 20134. We aim to assess the status of RCTs in ophthalmology, and will focus on publishing trends for RCTs in ophthalmology in the recent years with regards to different ophthalmology topics. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are situated at the top of hierarchy of evidence-based medicine, where its number and quality are important in the assessment of quality of evidence in a medical field. Most of the high impact RCTs are published in nonophthalmology journals
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