I am sure that I have read guidance that reporting individual quality of studies in reviews is not good practice, but that it is better to report quality of evidence statements (which are based on more than one study). I wonder what others opinions are on this? Note: i am talking about the quality of studies included in a review not the review itself.
There is no standard answer to this issue. It is up to what you are trying to demonstrate in your review. Illustrate the quality of the studies you used is a good practice if you build a model. If you are doing a systematic review, it is a good practice as well to communicate the quality of your selected literature with others.
I think there are two aspects to this. Firstly, the results of individual study quality appraisal/risk of bias assessments need to be reported in some way although this might be relegated to supplementary material in a published article. Secondly, in any report you need to give some overall account of the quality of the evidence that draws on the results of individual assessments. Finally, in offering an overall conclusion about any particular endpoint/intervention constellation in a review you need to also summarise the quality of the evidence linked to that specific conclusion. I think if you consult the PRISMA guidance (the de facto standard for reporting reviews in health care) the matter will become clearer. http://www.prisma-statement.org/
If u r going to publish ur study then it passes through critical review process...this is common..
If u did quality research then there should not be any fear ...u can go for review..
Thanks for the answers here. My specific issue is that we carried out a rapid review (although basically following standard SR procedure & practice), which resulted in a small number of studies with very divergent methodologies and variance in outcomes. Therefore we cannot and do not make any generalizable claims from the evidence, producing a narrative synthesis and a tentative conceptual model. The review looks at interventions, but in the field of education not health/medicine although is interested in wellbeing. We used a quality appraisal tool, but it is not really that relevant to what we are presenting and we do discuss the limits of the evidence base gathered in the review in more general terms. It is an area with a real paucity of studies so still makes a valid contribution in our view. We followed prisma in designing the protocol @peter, but my more general issue with SR methodology literature is that is it so focused on health/medicine, whereas the fields of studies using these methods seem to have expanded hugely and the accompanying methods lit doesn't seem to have caught up yet.
Any further thoughts...
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