About this example
QUADAS-2 judges diagnostic accuracy studies in four domains. Unclear judgements are common because many primary studies do not report how patients were selected or whether the index test was read blind to the reference standard.
The unweighted summary plot shows the share of studies per judgement in each domain, which is the usual choice for diagnostic reviews, where studies are not pooled with inverse-variance weights. QUADAS-2 also rates applicability concerns; plot those as a second figure with “Other tool”.
The data
| Study | Patient selection | Index test | Reference standard | Flow and timing | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruiz 2013 | High | Low | Low | Unclear | High |
| Schmidt 2014 | Low | Low | Low | Low | Low |
| Tanaka 2015 | Unclear | Unclear | Low | Low | Unclear |
| Umar 2016 | Low | High | Low | Low | High |
| Varga 2017 | Low | Low | Unclear | Low | Unclear |
| Wang 2018 | High | Low | Low | High | High |
| Xu 2019 | Low | Low | Low | Low | Low |
| Yilmaz 2020 | Low | Unclear | Low | Low | Unclear |
| Zhou 2021 | Low | Low | Low | Unclear | Unclear |
| Abbas 2022 | Low | Low | High | Low | High |
Open the example, replace the data with your own, and export the figure as SVG, PDF, PNG or TIFF.