The Critical Care Medicine Research: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Objectives: The cost-effectiveness terminology is a common term used in the critical care medicine research. A systematic review analysis was conducted to study the patterns of the use and misuse of the cost-effectiveness terminology in the critical care medicine literature between 1998 and 2018. Methods: A searched in the inCite journal citation report was done to identify all the critical care medicine journals. An independednt search done to identify all the articles between 1980 to 2018 that claimed in their abstracts/article to perform a cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA). Eligible articles were included and analyzed using x2-test. The articles were categorized into four different levels based on the appropriateness of CEA terminology use. The analysis performed to assess the association between the appropriateness of CEA terminology and the journal impact factor (IF), author background, and the publication year (5-year time points). Results: Out of 7,835 articles in targeted subject category, 76 met the inclusion criteria, but 50 of them were analyzed. Of these 50 articles, 32 (64.0%) met the appropriate criterion of CEA terminology use. 71.4% of articles published in journals with IF: 3.0 - 21.4 were appropriately using CEA term compared to 54.5% studies that are published in journals with IF: 0.4 - 2.8. Of these articles which are appropriately use CEA terminology, 56.2% of the articles have at least one author with health economics expertise. Conclusion and recommendation: The preliminary data suggest that there is an association between the level of appropriateness and journal impact factor and the author health-economic background authorship. However, we did not demonstrate changes in the level of appropriateness with time. Decision-makers, authors, and editors should pay better attention in seeking ways to monitor the appropriate use of 'cost-effectiveness' terminology. More future studies should be done in this context.