STARD guideline in diagnostic accuracy tests: perspective from a systematic reviewer

When I searched PubMed using the word “diagnostic[TI]” in December 16, 2015, I found that the number of publications has increased year by year, as shown in Figure 1. Notably, it increased rapidly after 2000. From 2003 [the year when the Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy (STARD) (1) was released] to 2015, a total of 48,341 publications were retrieved. Among these publications, I screened 100 that were published in 2015 and verified 28 publications that were original articles regarding the diagnostic accuracy tests. This means, from 2003 to 2015, that there are approximately 13,500 papers regarding diagnostic accuracy tests in PubMed. Next, I used Google Scholar to search the citation times of the STARD guideline, and found that all versions of STARD guideline have been cited for 3,088 times, while in Web of Science database, all version of STARD guideline has been cited for 2,291 times.