By shifting the responsibility for assessing papers from committees to individuals chosen for their expertise these reforms paved the way for the return of powerful individual editors.
The new tests would be subject to external supervision: outside examiners would assess papers but would not sit in on the tests.
To address this hypothesis we reviewed the literature and assessed papers according to a modified version of the Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies QUADASS) criteria from which 55 high quality papers were reviewed.
Two independent investigators assessed papers for inclusion.
Selection criteria Two authors independently assessed papers for eligibility.
We were unable to assess papers in languages other than the English language.
We will assess papers for risk of bias using the QUADAS-2 tool.
This study reported substantial variations between reviewers, and in individual reviewers who re-assessed papers using alternative methods [ 44].
Titles and abstracts were sifted by two reviewers and prior to retrieval of full articles, the two reviewers independently assessed papers for inclusion.
We were able to identify, retrieve and assess papers describing 19 studies, of which eight also presented data for an appropriate comparison group without diarrhoea.
