Table 4.

QUADAS-2 risk of bias assessment per setting

	Paper	Setting	Risk of bias
			Patient selection	Index test	Reference standard	Flow and timing	Data management
ED	Horng et al. [35]	Sepsis			?
	Haug et al. [62]	Sepsis			?
	Delahanty et al. [63]	Sepsis			?
	Brown et al. [28]	Severe sepsis and septic shock			?
In-hospital	Khojandi et al. [64]	Sepsis			?
	Futoma et al. [65]	Sepsis			?
	McCoy et al. [31]	Severe sepsis, Sepsis			?
	Lin et al. [66]	Septic shock			?
	Khoshnevisan et al. [14]	Septic shock			?
	Thiel et al. [29]	Septic shock			?
	Giannini et al. [30]	Severe sepsis and septic shock			?
ICU	Wang et al. [57]	Sepsis			?
	Shashikumar II et al. [67]	Sepsis			?
	Shashikumar I et al. [68]	Sepsis			?
	Scherpf et al. [59]	Sepsis			?
	Desautels et al. [54]	Sepsis			?
	Nemati et al. [55]	Sepsis			?
	Calvert II et al. [52]	Sepsis			?
	Kam et al. [53]	Sepsis			?
	Van Wyk I et al. [69]	Sepsis			?
	Van Wyk II et al. [70]	Sepsis			?
	Moss et al. [36]	Severe sepsis			?
	Guillén et al. [58]	Severe sepsis			?
	Shimabukuro et al. [32]	Severe sepsis			?
	Henry et al. [56]	Septic shock			?
	Calvert I et al. [33]	Septic shock			?
ED/In-hospital/ICU	Barton et al. [27]	Sepsis			?
	Mao et al. [71]	Sepsis, severe sepsis, septic shock			?

 low risk,  high risk, ? unclear risk