Investigation and Evaluation of Chinese Clinical Practice Guidelines Published in Medical Journals in 2019:Status of the Authorship and Guideline Development Group

  Objective  The aim of this study was to investigate the basic information authorship and guideline development group of Chinese clinical practice guidelines published in medical journals in 2019, so as to provide reference for the establishment of the Chinese guideline working group in the future.

  Methods  We searched and collected Chinese guidelines published in 2019 from four electronic databases, including China National Knowledge Infrastructure, WanFang Data Knowledge Service Platform, SinoMed, and PubMed. Chinese Medical Journal Network, Hong Kong Journals Online, Hong Kong Macau Periodicals Network, UM Digital Library Portal, and Taiwan Scholar Journal Database were also searched as supplements. Based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, two researchers independently screened guidelines by reading titles, abstracts, and full-texts. We extracted the basic information and information on the number, group, affiliation, specialty and discipline of guideline developers, and then made descriptive statistics.

  Results  Totally 226 qualified guidelines were included.The proportion of Chinese version vs. English version was 4∶1, more than 70% of guidelines were guided by societies and associations. The median number of guideline authors was 38(22, 54).A total of 194 kind of groups were found in the 226 guidelines, "expert group" was the most common name, but there is a lack of definition and explanation of their specific responsibilities and work. 35.4%(80/226) guidelines reported the specialty of developers, most of the guideline developers were from a single specialty (49/80, 61.3%) like clinical specialty (72/80, 90.0%) and with a single discipline (46/72, 63.8%).Only six guidelines were involved evidence-based medicine methodologists. Hospitals were the main working units (6073/6637, 91.5%) of guideline developers, among which hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou accounted for 27.3%.

  Conclusions  In the Chinese guidelines of 2019, there are important discrepancies, irregularity, and inadequate reports on authors' number, responsibility and grouping. We suggest that guideline developers not only attach importance to the methodology, and establish a guideline-development group with multidisciplinary and geographical representation and an appropriate size, but also give clear introductions and explanations when writing the guideline in the future.