Nine categories, derived from other reviews of reviews [ 19, 22], pertained to characteristics of the focus and methods of each review (general and specific behavior focus, target population, intervention setting, type of review, time span, number of studies included, criteria for study design and outcome measures).
In addition, the way of data collection, sample sizes per each review period, project time span, and acceptable deviations are considered with a focus on the project-specific properties.
As our review covers a time span of 11 years it was not possible to have equally long analysis periods.
The reviews in this category cover a time span of six years and there was a tendency for the most recent reviews to have higher AMSTAR score.
Our review focused on 1990 2015 as a reasonable time span.
Three reviews [ 26- 28] were identified as the baseline reviews for this project and their review strategies were carefully examined in aspects such as the aim and scope, time span, search strategy and search terms used, articles included in each review, and conclusions drawn.
Analyzing and synthesizing the results of previous reviews are time-consuming procedures, and therefore a time span between the searches and the submission to a journal cannot be avoided.
A comparison of the baseline data of a recent review of published observational studies in primary care (same time span as our study) with the baseline data of our study, revealed similar results regarding intermediate outcome indicators [ 32].
If several review publications by the same team of reviewers with the same focus and published within a time span of 3 years were available these were considered as updates unless inclusion criteria for the two versions were clearly different.
(Informant 3, female, 25 years in family practice) Reviewing patient cases gave them better insight into the time span and distribution of responsibility in relation to clinical pathways, thereby potentially improving their ability to perform this task.
It is interesting to note that the quantitative scenario studies looking into ICT reviewed here [48, 63, 64] all had a fairly short time span, whereas Arushanyan et al. [31] having a longer time perspective chose a qualitative assessment.
