31 Questionnaires in otology: a systematic mapping review 2 extraction form is available as Appendix 2.3 (p.37) Outcomes used in this article were first author, year of publication, country of development, institution of development, number of items, means of item generation, demographics of the study population, and available validated translations. An overview of the other questionnaire characteristics that were extracted from the development and/or validation papers is shown in Appendix 2.3 (p.37) and is related to the measurement properties and psychometric characteristics of these questionnaires (e.g., questionnaire (sub) domains and test-retest reliability). The psychometric data will be separately assessed per symptom category in future work. Results The majority of identified questionnaires were found through our database search. The PubMed and Embase. - com searches resulted in a total of 16,370 records. After removal of duplicates, 13,345 unique records remained. In 10,670 cases, screening of the title and abstract was sufficient for record exclusion. However, the screening phase was primarily aimed at identifying potentially relevant questionnaires. Two records were added through expert recommendation. Full-text examination was performed if the use of a questionnaire could not be excluded on the basis of title and abstract. A total of 2715 articles were fully assessed. At this stage, exclusion of records (Fig. 1 “records excluded [1] and[ 2]”) was primarily because both the abstract and full-text publication of the article were not accessible, full-text language was not English, the study was off-topic (e.g., not in the field of otology, paediatric population), or because of the absence of a questionnaire. Full-text examination resulted in the exclusion of many “anonymous” questionnaires. These concerned questionnaires without a name, without a graphic representation, and without any information on the development and/or validation or reference to a corresponding article. Only records without a potentially eligible questionnaire were excluded. Two thousand three hundred forty-three records were excluded based on full-text examination out of the 2715 records. In total, 420 questionnaires were identified as potentially eligible. In the following phase, all 420 questionnaires were assessed for eligibility. From this point, data on all questionnaires were saved in a separate digital database including the reasons for questionnaire exclusion (Fig. 1: “records excluded [3] and [4]”). Eligibility was assessed by examination of the development and/or validation article. A total of 265 questionnaires were excluded for various reasons (Table 2), and the most common reason being that full
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