Systematic Reviews
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Meta-Anal. Jun 26, 2015; 3(3): 142-150
Published online Jun 26, 2015. doi: 10.13105/wjma.v3.i3.142
Development of the Documentation and Appraisal Review Tool for systematic reviews
Rebecca L Diekemper, Belinda K Ireland, Liana R Merz
Rebecca L Diekemper, American College of Chest Physicians, CHEST, Glenview, IL 60026, United States
Belinda K Ireland, The EvidenceDoc, Pacific, MO 63069, United States
Liana R Merz, Center for Clinical Excellence, BJC HealthCare, Saint Louis, MO 63108, United States
Author contributions: Diekemper RL was the primary developer of the tool and she participated in the testing of the tool and drafting parts of the paper; Ireland BK came up with the concept of developing the tool and was a co-developer of the tool and participated in the testing of the tool and drafting parts of the paper; Merz LR was a co-developer of the tool and participated in the testing of the tool and drafting parts of the paper.
Conflict-of-interest: All of the authors report that they receive no financial compensation for DART. Diekemper RL uses DART for assessing the quality of systematic reviews used to inform guideline recommendations for CHEST guidelines. Due to her role as a developer of DART, the tool has been adopted by CHEST for use in guideline development. Ireland BK reports that as a consultant who frequently conducts systematic reviews and overviews of reviews, she is interested in an effective and efficient tool for evaluating the quality of systematic reviews. Merz LR has no conflicts of interest to disclose.
Data sharing: No additional data are available.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Rebecca L Diekemper, MPH, American College of Chest Physicians, 2595 Patriot Blvd, Glenview, IL 60026, United States. rdiekemper@chestnet.org
Telephone: +1-314-5319325
Received: January 27, 2015
Peer-review started: February 5, 2015
First decision: March 6, 2015
Revised: April 2, 2015
Accepted: April 27, 2015
Article in press: April 29, 2015
Published online: June 26, 2015
Core Tip

Core tip: Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are commonly used to inform the recommendations presented in evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the Documentation and Appraisal Review Tool (DART) for its comprehensiveness, identify areas addressed by DART that were not addressed by two other validated tools [Overview Quality Assessment Questionnaire (OQAQ) and Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR)], and to test its performance in eliciting consistent responses. We found that our tool was more comprehensive and included several questions not included in the other tools. We also found that DART elicited the most consistent responses when compared to OQAQ and AMSTAR.