Methods	Cluster RCT, with the community as the unit of randomisation
Participants	Primary care practitioners from 6 community hospitals. 62 inpatients and 112 outpa-tients.Intervention: n=3 and Control:n=3 Country: US Type of targeted behaviour: general management of a problem (rheumatoid arthritis care)
Interventions	Intervention Local Opinion Leaders Method of OL identification: Sociometric Proportion of social network that nominated OL: NOT CLEAR Single OL or OL teams identified:teams of GPs, unclear number OL disseminated information: NOT CLEAR OL frequency of involvement: UNCLEAR Control Standard dissemination
Outcomes	Proportion of patients receiving appropriate care for rheumatoid arthritis
Notes
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors’ judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Unclear risk	Pg.847/Col 1/Para 1 Six communities were utilised in this program, and they were randomly assigned to a control or an intervention group
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	Low risk	It was a cluster RCT, with the community as the unit of randomisation
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Not mentioned in the paper
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Unclear risk	Not mentioned in the paper
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Unclear risk	Do not say in the methods section which outcomes they will retrieve
Other bias	Low risk
Similar baseline outcome measures?	Low risk	P.847/Table 1
Similar baseline characteristics?	Unclear risk	P.848/Table 1
Protection against contamination?	Low risk	The community was the unit of allocation.