Short email with attachment versus long email without attachment when contacting authors to request unpublished data for a systematic review: a nested randomised trial

OBJECTIVE: Systematic reviews often rely on the acquisition of unpublished analyses or data. We carried out a nested randomised trial comparing two different approaches for contacting authors to request additional data for a systematic review. PARTICIPANTS: Participants were authors of published reports of prevention or treatment trials in stroke in which there was central adjudication of events. A primary and secondary research active author were selected as contacts for each trial. INTERVENTIONS: Authors were randomised to be sent either a short email with a protocol of the systematic review attached (‘Short’) or a longer email that contained detailed information and without the protocol attached (‘Long’). A maximum of two emails were sent to each author to obtain a response. The unit of analysis was trial, accounting for clustering by author. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome was whether a response was received from authors. Secondary outcomes included time to response, number of reminders needed before a response was received and whether authors agreed to collaborate. RESULTS: 88 trials with 76 primary authors were identified in the systematic review, and of these, 36 authors were randomised to Short (trials=45) and 40 to Long (trials=43). Responses were received for 69 trials. There was no evidence of a difference in response rate between trial arms (Short vs Long, OR 1.10, 95% CI 0.36 to 3.33). There was no evidence of a difference in time to response between trial arms (Short vs Long, HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.55 to 1.51). In total, 27% of authors responded within a day and 22% of authors never responded. CONCLUSIONS: There was no evidence to suggest that email format had an impact on the number of responses received when acquiring data for a systematic review involving stroke trials or the time taken to receive these responses.