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. 2020 Dec 1;5:16. doi: 10.1186/s41073-020-00101-3

Table 2.

Reporting scores by questionnaire section. Independent sample comparison p values are from Student’s t-tests, while paired samples’ ones are from paired t-tests. In the paired sample there were 32 preprints and 35 peer-reviewed articles with no applicable questions in the Drugs and Reagents section; thus, there were only 17 pairs available for the statistical comparison. 2-way ANOVA results are presented in individual lines below each comparison set. All values are presented as mean ± S.D. 95% C.I.; 95% confidence interval of the difference

Study stage Subset # of applicable questions Score (preprints) Score (peer-reviewed) Difference [95% C.I.] pvalue Sample size
Independent samples Title and abstract 1 ± 0 84.2 ± 36.7 93.4 ± 25.0 9.2 [−0.8, 19.3] 0.07 76
Risk of bias 3.7 ± 0.5 39.3 ± 23.6 39.9 ± 20.2 0.6 [−6.4, 7.6] 0.87 76
Drugs and reagents 1.2 ± 1.4 62.2 ± 36.0 78.5 ± 29.2 16.3 [0.6, 31.9] 0.04 31 (bioRxiv), 38 (PubMed)
Data presentation 7.3 ± 0.9 75.1 ± 16.9 79.9 ± 12.7 4.8 [−0.02, 9.6] 0.05 76
Data analysis 6 ± 0 83.6 ± 20.4 81.0 ± 19.4 −2.6 [−8.9, 3.9] 0.44 76
Group: F = 5.53, df = 1, p = 0.02; Section: F = 97.09, df = 4, p < 2 × 10−16; Interaction: F = 2.46, df = 4, p = 0.04
Paired sample Title and abstract 1 ± 0 85.7 ± 35.3 83.9 ± 37.1 1.8 [−8.0, 4.4] 0.57 56
Risk of bias 3.7 ± 0.5 39.7 ± 20.6 54.2 ± 17.4 14.6 [8.4, 20.8] 1.6 × 10−5 56
Drugs and reagents 0.9 ± 1.3 66.4 ± 35.7 81.6 ± 26.8 15.2 [4.0, 26.4] 0.01 17
Data presentation 7.3 ± 0.8 78.4 ± 12.5 80.9 ± 13.3 2.5 [−0.3, 5.4] 0.08 56
Data analysis 6 ± 0 84.5 ± 16.2 88.1 ± 14.2 3.6 [−0.5, 7.6] 0.08 56
Group: F = 6.31, df = 1, p = 0.01; Section: F = 50.37, df = 4, p < 2 × 10−16; Interaction: F = 2.00, df = 4, p = 0.09