I´m doing a systematic review for my final grade project and found out that two of my studies present with high risk-of-bias. Since I only have 5 studies in my review and I will not conduct a meta-analysis on the data, I´m wondering if I can use the data from the two biased studies as part of the narrative data synthesis.
Oona Valve I would suggest you have a sub-chapter in your results to present the risk of bias of the studies and then you include some information about these articles in you synthesis and in your limitations (these 2 articles with risk of bias could be considered a limitation of the studies).
Yes! However, you have to do it in a way that is very similar to sensitivity analysis of quantitative data - try presenting them as a whole first, then discuss what would happen if the information from the two articles in question is excluded from the synthesis.
I believe it is fine to include such studies in your systematic review. However, you should be very transparent in describing the biases and be very cautious when making conclusion out of these studies. Even if you choose to exclude these studies you should be able to explain and justify the reason for not including the studies.
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