The initial development of the nonsurgical patient questionnaire was based on questionnaire tools provided by eight centers around the globe that have collected nonsurgical information from endometriosis cases and controls on a large scale (criterion: publication on > 100 cases).
During workshop I and a subsequent consultation round, we identified 18 centers worldwide that collect biologic fluid samples from endometriosis cases and controls on a large scale (criterion: publication on >100 cases); all provided SOPs for sample collection, processing, and storage.
For the abstracts that potentially met these criteria, publications were obtained if available.
For the abstracts that met the predefined inclusion criteria, publications (full text) were obtained.
Inclusion criteria: Publications were included if they described results from RCTs of belimumab for SLE patients with positive autoantibodies.
First, the "original" undivided universities prior to 1985 were ranked in quintiles, separately by each of the two criteria (publications and student preference-based choices).
After application of the prespecified inclusion/exclusion criteria, publications from 10 research groups were examined in detail and study characteristics were presented in tabular form (Table 1).
ii *For publications to be considered as reporting information in accordance with CONSORT criteria, publications had to provide an explicit statement or clear and unambiguous information outlining details relevant to that CONSORT criteria.
The research protocol defined in this study contains the following information: objective, research questions, electronic source selection criteria, publication inclusion/ exclusion criteria, data extraction and storage procedure, analysis procedure, and protocol test procedure.
Thus, based on a sequence of selection criteria (publication or not, randomisation to 10% and the final exclusion), 842 QAPs were included in the study.
