Guideline for Systematic Reviews of Outcome Measurement Instruments
Methodology to help you prepare, select, evaluate, interpret and report on studies in your systematic review of outcome measurement instruments.
Methodology to help you prepare, select, evaluate, interpret and report on studies in your systematic review of outcome measurement instruments.Systematic reviews of outcome measurement instruments are important tools for selecting the most suitable instrument to measure a construct of interest in a specific study population. High quality systematic reviews can provide a comprehensive overview of the quality (i.e. measurement properties) of instruments and supports evidence-based recommendations for the selection of the most suitable instrument for a given purpose (i.e. research or clinical practice; or discriminative, evaluative or predictive applications).
Systematic reviews of outcome measurement instruments differ from reviews of interventions and diagnostic test accuracy studies and are complex. In fact, multiple reviews (i.e. one review per measurement property) are included in a review of one or more measurement instruments.
The COSMIN methodology is developed specifically for patient-reported outcomes (PROMs), and is now adapted for use in systematic reviews of other types of outcome measurement instruments, such as clinician-reported outcome measures (ClinROMs), performance-based outcome measures (PerFOMs), and laboratory values. The PRISMA-COSMIN reporting guideline helps you to accuratly report your systematic review.
8-step procedure for conducting a systematic review on PROMs
We updated the COSMIN guideline for conducting systematic reviews of PROMs, and developed a consecutive eight-step procedure: formulate the research question (step 1), formulate the eligibility criteria (step 2), develop the literature search (step 3), perform the search (step 4), extract the PROM data (step 5), evaluate the nine measurement properties per PROM (step 6), formulate recommendations (step 7), and report the systematic review (step 8).
In an animated video these steps are explained.
To help you conducting a systematic review of PROMs, we developed several tools for you to use
A comprehensive user manual is written on how to conduct each of these eight steps. You can use the COSMIN review management file to extract all data, and add ratings and gradings for all studies and (summarized) results.
Additional tools to download:
To help you assess content validity:
We describe 7 challenges and solutions when evaluating content validity in a systematic review of PROMs in Chambers et al. 2026.
To help you develop your tables:
Templates for tables are described in Elsman 2025.
To help you report your systematic review of outcome measurement instruments, we developed the PRISMA-COSMIN for OMIs reporting guideline
In collaboration with the EnRICH team of the SickKids Hospital in Toronto, Canada, we developed the PRISMA-COSMIN reporting guideline for systematic reviews of outcome measurement instruments. Key information is often lacking in published systematic review reports on outcome measurement instruments, which makes it difficult to judge the quality of these instruments. By creating this reporting guideline, we aim to improve the accuracy and completeness of information in these reports.
Conducting a systematic review on ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values
When you are conducting a systematic review on for ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values, we recommend you to replace the boxes on reliability and measurement error of the COSMIN Risk of Bias checklist to the COSMIN Risk of Bias tool to assess the quality of studies on reliability and measurement error. In the accompanying User manual we describe how to use the tool, and conduct such a review.
When you are conducting a systematic review including both PROMs and ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values, we recommend you to follow the instructions given in the User manual of the COSMIN Risk of Bias tool to assess the quality of studies on reliability and measurement error.
We developed a consecutive eleven-step procedure for conducting a systematic review specifically for ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values. Steps 1-4 concern preparing and performing the literature search, and selecting relevant studies. Steps 5 concerns the data extraction. In the step 6-9 the measurement properties are assessed. Steps 10 and 11 concern formulating recommendations and reporting the systematic review.
To help you conducting a systematic review of ClinROMs, PerFOMs and laboratory values
A comprehensive user manual is written on how to conduct these eleven steps in a systematic review any outcome measurement instrument, i.e. PROMs, ClinROMs, PerFOMs, and laboratory values.