An efficient strategy allowed English-speaking reviewers to identify foreign-language articles eligible for a systematic review

Objective: To assess English-speaking reviewers’ accuracy in determining the eligibility of foreign-language articles for a systematic review. Study Design and Settings: Systematic review of randomized controlled trials of therapy for fibromyalgia. Guided by 10 questions, English-speaking reviewers screened noneEnglish-language articles for eligibility. Teams of two native-language speakers provided reference standard judgments of eligibility. Results: Of 15,466 potentially eligible articles, we retrieved 763 in full text, of which 133 were published in 19 non-English languages; 53 trials published in 11 languages other than English proved eligible. Of the 53 eligible articles, English-language reviewers guided by the 10 questions mistakenly judged 6 as ineligible; of the 80 ineligible articles, 8 were incorrectly judged eligible by English-language reviewers (sensitivity 5 0.89; specificity 50.90). Use of a simple three-step rule (excluding languages with less than three articles, reviewing