Rating for narrative reviews: concept and development of the International Narrative Systematic Assessment tool
Year: 2015
Type: review
Abstract: Background: Narrative reviews differ from systematic reviews in numerous ways. Generally, they tend to be mainly descriptive, donot involve a systematic search of the literature, and thereby often focus on a subset of studies of a certain topic chosen based onavailability or author selection. These are typical review articles that can be found in most journals. The quality rating of the selectedstudies is another crucial point. Surprisingly, at this point of time there are no measures that judge the quality of narrative reviews.The goal of this study was to design an instrument providing an easy and convenient tool for the quality assessment of narrativereviews for systematic reviews (International Narrative Systematic assessment, INSA)Methods: Web searches on PubMed database and Google (considering the firsts 5 pages) have been conducted in February 2015 bytwo independent reviewers. No restriction language restriction was applied. The tool designed is an adapted version based on theavailable criteria for the quality assessment of systematic reviews. The tool reviewed are: the AMSTAR tool (Shea et al, 2007) andOverview Quality Assessment Questionnaire (OQAQ) by Oxman and Guyatt (1991).Results: Eleven epidemiologist and physicians in public health participated in the study. The study results suggest that the instrumentcontent is sufficiently comprehensive. The reviewers expressed strong support for the instrument's content for assessing the quality ofnarrative reviews and are consent about the usefulness of the tool.Conclusion: The INSA tool is a valid measure of the quality of research overviews.
Source: Senses & sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $269
OpenAlex ID: W2907668499