Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. Meta-analysis of high-quality primary articles represents the top-quality evidence in medical literature. We screened a total of studies.
We obtained different characteristics, and we determined the quality of reporting using the AMSTAR tool, an items tool that assesses the content validity and methodological quality of systematic reviews and meta-analysis. A total of studies were included in our assessment. The first meta-analysis included was published in March, while the last one was on the 31st of October.
The urge to publish during the COVID period or any other surge in publishing should not be at the expense of quality. Meta-analysis is the analysis of primary studies, where primary studies can be randomized controlled trials for treatment-related studies, and can be cohort studies for diagnostic and prognostic studies [ 1 ].
While it is possible to conduct a meta-analysis with only two studies in principle, evidence extracted from such studies may not be well received as strong evidence by the research community. Moreover, the methods used for data extraction and the quality of reporting are of paramount importance to decide the quality of evidence that can be extracted from such studies.
Since the beginning of the recent Coronavirus disease COVID , researchers rushed into publishing primary studies reporting characteristics of patients and effectiveness of treatments, where the number of primary publications were increasing since January [ 2 ], even before announcing the COVID as a pandemic. However, the increase in publications usually associated with of quality issues, where proportions of such studies may also be falsified [ 3 , 4 ].
