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International audience; Systematic reviews and meta-analyses constitute one of the central pillars of evidence-based medicine. However, clinical trials are poorly reported which delays meta-analyses and consequently the translation of clinical research findings to clinical practice. We propose a Center of Excellence in Research Reporting in Neurosurgery (CERR-N) and the creation of a clinically significant computational ontology to encode Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) studies in neurosurgery. A 128 element strong computational ontology was derived from the Trial Bank ontology by omitting classes which were not required to perform meta-analysis. Three researchers from our team tagged five randomly selected RCT's each, published in the last 5 years (2004-2008), in the Journal of Neurosurgery (JoN), Neurosurgery Journal (NJ) and Journal of Neurotrauma (JoNT). We evaluated inter and intra observer reliability for the ontology using percent agreement and kappa coefficient. The inter-observer agreement was 76.4%, 75.97% and 74.9% and intra-observer agreement was 89.8%, 80.8% and 86.56% for JoN, NJ and JoNT respectively. The inter-observer kappa coefficient was 0.60, 0.54 and 0.53 and the intra-observer kappa coefficient was 0.79, 0.82 and 0.79 for JoN, NJ and JoNT journals respectively. The high degree of inter and intra-observer agreement confirms tagging consistency in sections of a given scientific manuscript. Standardizing reporting for neurosurgery articles can be reliably achieved through the integration of a computational ontology within the context of a CERR-N. This approach holds potential for the overall improvement in the quality of reporting of RCTs in neurosurgery, ultimately streamlining the translation of clinical research findings to improvement in patient care.

Background The purpose of the study was to evaluate systematic reviews of research into two public health priorities, tobacco consumption and HIV infection, in terms of the reporting of data related to the applicability of trial results (i.e., whether the results of a trial can be reasonably applied or generalized to a definable group of patients in a particular setting in routine practice, also called external validity or generalisability). Methods All systematic reviews of interventions aimed at reducing or stopping tobacco use and treating or preventing HIV infection published in the Cochrane database of systematic reviews and in journals indexed in MEDLINE between January 1997 and December 2007 were selected. We used a standardized data abstraction form to extract data related to applicability in terms of the context of the trial, (country, centres, settings), participants (recruitment, inclusion and exclusion criteria, baseline characteristics of participants such as age, sex, ethnicity, coexisting diseases or co-morbidities, and socioeconomic status), treatment (duration, intensity/dose of treatment, timing and delivery format), and the outcomes assessment from selected reviews. Results A total of 98 systematic reviews were selected (57 Cochrane reviews and 41 non-Cochrane reviews); 49 evaluated interventions aimed at reducing or stopping tobacco use and 49 treating or preventing HIV infection. The setting of the individual studies was reported in 45 (46%) of the systematic reviews, the number of centres in 21 (21%), and the country where the trial took place in 62 (63%). Inclusion and exclusion criteria of the included studies were reported in 16 (16%) and 13 (13%) of the reviews, respectively. Baseline characteristics of participants in the included studies were described in 59 (60%) of the reviews. These characteristics concerned age in about half of the reviews, sex in 46 (47%), and ethnicity in 9 (9%). Applicability of results was discussed in 13 (13%) of the systematic reviews. The reporting was better in systematic reviews by the Cochrane Collaboration than by non-Cochrane groups. Conclusions Our study highlighted the lack of consideration of applicability of results in systematic reviews of research into 2 public health priorities: tobacco consumption and HIV infection.