Quality assessing of RCTs in Cochrane Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Group and mapping the state-of-the-art with bibliometric analysis of top highly cited articles

Abstract

In recent decades, the number of magazines and articles published in the field of medical sciences has increased significantly. Efforts to improve the quality and reduce bias in these studies can have positive results in the process of treating patients and also reducing the costs of the healthcare system, and this quality assessment study has been conducted in this direction. Also, considering the variety and abundance of available evidence in the field of multiple sclerosis and its urinary complications, the development of information retrieval technologies will help researchers to find the most relevant scientific resources. Materials and methods: This research, which is one of the types of descriptive-analytical research, was conducted through scientometric techniques and social network analysis, bibliometric analysis. The research community is made up of all the scientific productions published in the Cochrane database related to multiple sclerosis. To retrieve the records of this research, the search has been done without time limit. After extracting the information related to each systematic review study and the information and reports related to the quality of the evaluated trial studies, such as the types of possible biases raised in the studies, were reviewed. For clustering, illustrating and checking the frequency of occurrence of words, drawing co-authorship networks, and citation analysis, the full report information of articles such as title, abstract, keywords, references, number of pages, authors and journal information, is saved in Excel file and txt files. and analyzed by VOS viewer software version 0.5.6.1. Findings: During the qualitative review of clinical trials under the systematic review, the most common risk of bias was Low for Selective reporting (reporting data) and then Unclear for Allocation concealment (selection bias). On the other hand, the highest risk of bias was in the group of blinding of participants and personnel (performance bias) and the lowest risk of bias was in the group of selective reporting (reporting data). Also, based on the scientific evaluation in the field of multiple sclerosis and its urological complications, 72 sources and 4019 references were examined, the most related source was Neurology and Urodynamics and the most related author was Charter-Kastler E. Also, the CO-CITATION network between authors and different sources was schematically drawn.