Short email with attachment versus long email without attachment when contacting authors to request unpublished data for a systematic review: a nested randomised trial.

Abstract

Systematic reviews often rely on the acquisition of unpublished analyses or data. We carried out a nested randomised trial comparing two different approaches for contacting authors to request additional data for a systematic review. Participants were authors of published reports of prevention or treatment trials in stroke in which there was central adjudication of events. A primary and secondary research active author were selected as contacts for each trial. Authors were randomised to be sent either a short email with a protocol of the systematic review attached ('Short') or a longer email that contained detailed information and without the protocol attached ('Long'). A maximum of two emails were sent to each author to obtain a response. The unit of analysis was trial, accounting for clustering by author. The primary outcome was whether a response was received from authors. Secondary outcomes included time to response, number of reminders needed before a response was received and whether authors agreed to collaborate. 88 trials with 76 primary authors were identified in the systematic review, and of these, 36 authors were randomised to Short (trials=45) and 40 to Long (trials=43). Responses were received for 69 trials. There was no evidence of a difference in response rate between trial arms (Short vs Long, OR 1.10, 95% CI 0.36 to 3.33). There was no evidence of a difference in time to response between trial arms (Short vs Long, HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.55 to 1.51). In total, 27% of authors responded within a day and 22% of authors never responded. There was no evidence to suggest that email format had an impact on the number of responses received when acquiring data for a systematic review involving stroke trials or the time taken to receive these responses.