Use of Systematic Reviews in Preventing Research Waste in Emergency Medicine Randomized Controlled Trials

Abstract

Remarkably, an estimated 85% of wasted medical research results in billions of research dollars wasted each year. (Chalmers and Glasziou, 2009) Systematic reviews are a well-recognized methodology for mitigating research waste. Studies have shown that a portion of randomized controlled trials in medicine have not used SRs properly. In the field of emergency medicine, there has been no studies conducted over this problem. This study’s goal is to find out if randomized controlled trials in emergency medicine research included a SR, and to see if those trials that did include SRs used them as justification for their study. We searched PubMed for studies that were published between 01/01/2014 and 12/31/2017. This search resulted in 615 studies. We found that 275 of them fulfilled the requirements of a RCT. The bibliographies of the 275 studies were analyzed for evidence of SR citation. If a SR citation was present, we determined if information from the citation was used to justify the RCT. Of the 275 studies, we found that 66%, 95%, and 74% studies did not use SR citations as justification or did not have SR citations at all in the introduction, methods, and discussion sections respectively. The results from this study reveal that there is a lack of justification for RCTs in emergency medicine research due to the underutilization of meaningful SR citations. Trialists in emergency medicine should be more proactive in citing SRs in their studies to prevent wasted resources.