I am conducting a systematic review of intervention, and i observed that one included study could determine the statistical significance of the final meta-analysis.
Problem is, that article has been published in a predatory journal, indexed in Medline.
How would you manage this situation? My first thought was to exclude it, but there isn't any legitimate guideline about this yet. Moreover, this study has already been cited in several articles published in peer-review journals.
I could find some suggestions in this paper Article Commentary: The impact of predatory publishing on the conduc...
but i'm still in doubt.What's your thinking?
I would exclude the "science immoral" ones, and add a few more from the nice guys. :-)
In a systematic review, multiple sources of information can be used. If decided in the methodology section and if the authors use strict quality criteria, then any source of information can be used. Moreover, some fields of research such as drug adverse events demand inclusion of every possible source of information. Always the method of quality evaluation of included studies should be reported in the methodology section.
The systematic review itself a process to find out the best quality of evidence possible. In this process, irrespective of the particular journal you will be collecting the articles and assess for risk of bias plus the quality of evidence. Use proper tools, if you find the article eligible and after assessing every aspect if found good quality in the methodology and the evidence, then there is no reason to exclude it. Journal doesn't assure you about the quality of research work. It assures the quality of publication may be positive or negative results about a fact.
Systematic reviews synthesize and analyses findings both qualitatively as well as quantitatively. In such reviews, studies selected are assessed for their quality. Predatory journals are increasing, it is difficult for authors at times to navigate the populous of new journals released by predatory journals. Authors need to cross check the journals they are publishing their research work.
But if the research produced is of good quality and valuable in its research output, I think the studies can be considered.
Dear all
Very interesting question
But in my opinion we should move into a previous point. Why do we accept this research under suspicion? We should only recognize excellent research in the curricula
I'm not include the pedratory journals in meta-analisis for many studies here published are a lake methodology or presence many severals ethicals problems.so it is better to include indexed studies in databases such as pubmed, Hinari, Embase, Epistonomikos, Science Direct, Scopus, if you want studies in Latin America Lillacs, Scielo or manually searching in academic journals of universities or societies of each specialty
Interesting - you wrote: "... one included study could determine the statistical significance of the final meta-analysis. ". Is that the case in the end? With/without that trial (I guess RCT but you didn't specify that - it could be unrandomized if you're running a lev. 3 meta-analysis) do the meta-analysis results change? Thank you
This a very interesting question. The problem of predatory journal is in the journal not the paper or study. The role of author in the systematic review is to judge the quality of included studies. Therefore, I will include all published papers no matter which journal there are published in. I may do a subgroup analysis by the quality of included studies, rather than by the journal from.
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