Director of the Center of Clinical Epidemiology, Institute of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology, University Hospital of Essen, Hufelandstr. 55, 45147, Essen, Germany.
Department of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health, 715 Albany St, Boston, MA, 02118, USA.
Eur J Epidemiol. 2018 Nov;33(11):1025-1031. doi: 10.1007/s10654-018-0443-3. Epub 2018 Sep 26.
The Newcastle-Ottawa scale (NOS) is one of many scales used to judge the quality of observational studies in systematic reviews. It was criticized for its arbitrary definitions of quality items in a commentary in 2010 in this journal. That commentary was cited 1,250 times through December 2016. We examined the citation history of this commentary in a random sample of 100 full papers citing it, according to the Web of Science. Of these, 96 were systematic reviews, none of which quoted the commentary directly. All but 2 of the 96 indirect quotations (98%) portrayed the commentary as supporting use of the NOS in systematic reviews when, in fact, the opposite was the case. It appears that the vast majority of systematic review authors who cited this commentary did not read it. Journal reviewers and editors did not recognize and correct these major quotation errors. Authors should read each source they cite to make sure their direct and indirect quotations are accurate. Reviewers and editors should do a better job of checking citations and quotations for accuracy. It might help somewhat for commentaries to include abstracts, so that the basic content can be conveyed by PubMed and other bibliographic resources.
纽卡斯尔-渥太华量表（NOS）是用于评估系统评价中观察性研究质量的众多量表之一。在 2010 年本刊的一篇评论中，它因对质量项目的任意定义而受到批评。截至 2016 年 12 月，该评论被引用了 1250 次。我们根据 Web of Science 从引用该评论的 100 篇全文论文中随机抽取了一个样本，检查了该评论的引用历史。其中 96 篇是系统评价，没有一篇直接引用该评论。96 篇间接引用（98%）中只有 2 篇（2%）的说法与事实相符，即评论支持在系统评价中使用 NOS。事实上，情况正好相反。看来，引用这篇评论的绝大多数系统评价作者都没有读过它。期刊审稿人和编辑没有认识到并纠正这些主要的引述错误。作者应该阅读他们引用的每一个来源，以确保他们的直接和间接引述是准确的。审稿人和编辑应该更好地检查引文和引述的准确性。评论中包含摘要可能会有所帮助，以便 PubMed 和其他书目资源可以传达基本内容。
