Date:2025-05-17
Author:Christopher Baethge, Sandra Goldbeck-Wood, Stephan Mertens
Pages:7
Summary:The article introduces SANRA, a scale for assessing the quality of narrative review articles in medical literature. Narrative reviews are common but lack formal quality assessment tools compared to systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials (RCTs). SANRA was developed by a team of experienced journal editors to address this gap. The scale consists of six items rated from 0 (low standard) to 2 (high standard), covering aspects such as the importance and aims of the review, literature search, referencing, evidence level, and relevant endpoint data. The scale was tested on 30 consecutive non-systematic review manuscripts submitted to a general medical journal. Results showed that SANRA is feasible for everyday editorial work, with satisfactory internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.68) and inter-rater reliability (intra-class correlation coefficient = 0.77). The scale's sum scores were modestly associated with manuscript acceptance, suggesting some criterion validity. However, further field testing and validation are recommended. SANRA is intended to complement journal-specific evaluations and improve the quality of narrative reviews.