Analyze and Assess the Validity of Spine Tool Scoring of Meta-Analysis Articles Related to Patients Receiving Team Based Care for Diabetes

Abstract

Specific Aims: to identify commonly missed components of a journal article that make it unclear or difficult to interpret, to make correlations between spine scores and: journal impact factor, and quality assessment. Methods: 34 articles were reviewed from a meta-analysis of team-based care for diabetes (Lee 2020). Articles met the inclusion criteria if they were included in the Lee meta-analysis, and reported HgA1C as primary outcome. Articles that used systolic and diastolic blood pressure as the primary outcomes were excluded. The 34 articles were divided between the investigators with overlap so that each article was scored twice. A score of 1 was given if the article had the component, and 0 if the article did not. The total overall score for each article was the sum of the scoring tool component scores with 33 possible points. The total score for each article, referred to as the total calculated Spine scores, was analyzed to evaluate hypotheses 2.1 and 2.2. Results: Using Spine tool data value for each article (n=36) and the impact factor, the R value and p-value is calculated. With the data we collected for the impact factor vs the Spine tools, the R value is found to be 0.9108. Using the R score, a p-value is calculated with significance level of 0.05 and resulted in a p value of <0.00001. After separating the articles based on potential for bias listed in the Lee et. al article, a two-tailed t-test is calculated with a significance level of 0.05. The t-value was found to be 1.60297 and the p-value is 0.118193. Conclusion: This retrospective observational analysis displays a positive correlation between journal impact factor and Spine scoring. Although the Spine scoring tool could potentially guide researchers in writing more comprehensible journal articles, its true effectiveness is yet to be determined in future studies