Fig. 1

Flow diagram presenting the inclusion of Cochrane systematic reviews in the study. We retrieved 955 Cochrane systematic reviews from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews that were published from July 2015 to July 2016. We excluded 187 Cochrane reviews because they were either empty (without a single study included), diagnostic accuracy reviews, overviews of systematic reviews or they were withdrawn. We included 768 Cochrane reviews in our analysis; of those, 602 were included in our primary analysis because they had other bias domain in the Cochrane risk of bias tool, while 166 Cochrane reviews were included in our secondary analysis because they either did not have other bias domain in the Cochrane risk of bias tool, or they had this domain, but also other non-standard domains in the tool