The methodological quality of systematic reviews indexed in the MEDLINE database: A multivariate approach

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the methodology quality of the literature search protocols of systematic reviews and to assess the relevance of the search filter that applies PubMed for retrieving this type of publication of the MEDLINE database.

For the selection of the document type, a literature search about nutritional and metabolic diseases was carried out in MEDLINE and the PubMed filter was used for retrieving “Systematic Reviews”, selecting “Nutritional and Metabolic Diseases” from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) database as Major Topic to determine the area of knowledge. Data analysis was carried out using “External Logistic Biplot”, a novel multivariate statistical technique in the field of medical documentation.

The results highlight the large variability of the methodology used in the literature search protocols of the systematic reviews analysed and confirm the low precision of the filter used by PubMed for the recovery of systematic reviews.

The Logistic Biplot used in this research allows an optimal categorization of the different documentary typologies and classifies the documents by their methodological quality, demonstrating its usefulness for the future development of the bibliometric analysis.