The planning and reporting of synthesis questions in systematic review of intervention have a direct and important impact on the validity of the evaluation and the credibility of the results. Planning helps to reduce bias in the evaluation process and ensure the reproducibility of data synthesis. However, the field of systematic review currently lacks specific checklists and tools to guide how to plan and report these issues. The InSynQ (Intervention Synthesis Questions) checklist is a tool designed for planning and reporting data synthesis issues in systematic reviews of interventions. Its goal is to promote the standardization of systematic review methods, support systematic review participants in planning and comprehensively reporting data synthesis issues and structures, and provide a more accurate evidence base for clinical decision-making.
In the process of guideline development and construction of clinical questions, it is necessary to guide clinicians to propose clinical problems into PICO (population, intervention, control, outcome) structured clinical questions. However, there are still unclear criteria to define and judge the appropriateness of the width of the PICO elements of a clinical question. Either too wide or too narrow can make the PICO question unsuitable to be a question for clinical practice guidelines to answer. We graded the clinical questions to be eight grades (3, 2, 1, 0, ?1, ?2, ?3, mixed) according to the number of the PIC elements, which obviously needed to be adjusted to evaluate applicability of the appropriateness of the width of the clinical questions. Our work can provide methodological references for clinicians and guideline developers.
The PICO model is a general model in building problems of evidence-based medicine (EBM). However, with the deepening and refinement of the medical research and the rising of qualitative research, the PICO model could not satisfy all problems. This article introduces the expansions of the PICO model and puts forward the SPIDER model according to the qualitative problem and its relationship with the PICO model, which can build the best search strategy of clinical problems in a short time.
