TABLE 1.

Scoring Criteria for Methodological Quality of Animal Studies of Tendon-Bone Healing^a

Criteria	Scores	Comments
Unit of sample	Unilateral, 1; bilateral, 0	Studies with bilateral operation may regard limbs as independent samples and assign them to different treatment groups
Standardization of surgical procedure	Yes, 1; no, 0	Descriptions about graft harvest, surgical approach, drilling tunnels, graft tensioning, and fixation method are important
Description of surgical complications	Yes, 1; no, 0	Details such as wound infection and postoperative morbidity and mortality
Biomechanical testing	Yes, 1; no, 0	Mechanical testing is a useful outcome when assessing tendon-bone healing
Variation (ratio of SD to mean)	<50%, 1; >50%, 0	Large SD may imply poor precision or large intragroup variations
Statistical method and control group	Appropriate, 1; inappropriate, 0	Appropriate statistical tests were used, such as analysis of variance or Kruskal-Wallis test
Description of tendon-bone interface	Yes, 1; no, 0	During histological analysis, sampling description for region of interest is important
Semiquantitative histological analysis	Yes, 1; no, 0	During histological analysis, the use of scoring systems indicates better study quality

^aModified from Hooijmans et al.¹⁸