Evidence Tables Working Group (ETWG)
G-I-N aims to ‘facilitate information sharing, education and knowledge transfer, and collaborative working between guideline programmes to promote best practice and avoid duplication of effort’.
Background
G-I-N aims to ‘facilitate information sharing, education and knowledge transfer, and collaborative working between guideline programmes to promote best practice and avoid duplication of effort’. If G-I-N is to achieve the aim of reduced duplication of effort then sharing of evidence tables is one of the simplest ways to achieve this.
There is, however, confusion about the definition of evidence tables. The following definition has therefore been used as a starting point for the work of the evidence table work:
“Evidence tables are methodological and outcome summaries that present data from a number of related studies. These answer a well defined question in a consistent format and aim to demonstrate overall trends in the evidence and enable the process of making recommendations.”
Aims and Objectives
The aim of the Evidence Tables Working Group (ETWG) is to define a minimum data set that should be included in all evidence tables. This could allow the creation of a database of evaluated studies with data presented in a consistent format that G-I-N members could use in their guideline development process to populate their evidence tables using the data directly as presented or slightly modified according to their specific needs.
To reach these objectives the ETGW agreed that a single format to address different types of questions (e.g. intervention, diagnosis accuracy, ...) is difficult to achieve. Hence, the ETWG group focused its work on identifying the data to be extracted from the considered studies for the addressed question and producing relevant templates[1].
The templates have been built taking into account the below mentioned elements:
- Inclusion of most objectives and factual data that summarise the study, incorporating key data that allow quality/validity assessment and avoid second time review
- Provision of a set of explanatory notes about what should be considered for inclusion under each heading.
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[1] Minimum data abstracted from a single study to allow consistent comparison across studies and to inform a group process in evidence synthesis
