Declan Devane (DD)

DD contributed to the protocol by contributing to the design and writing.

DD contributed to the review by contributing to the design of the review, appraising the quality of and extracting data from selected papers, contributing to the interpretation of data, writing the review and providing a methodological and clinical perspective.

Simon Gates (SG)
SG provided methodological and statistical expertise in the development of the review, and assisted with analysis of data and interpretation of results.

Marie Hatem (MH)
MH registered the title and took the lead in the development of the protocol as the contact author. MH wrote the first version of the protocol, received all comments and suggestions from co‐authors and referees and revised the protocol for publication.

MH is joint first author of the review. She was the contact author between 2004 and 2006. She received the list of the eligible papers from the Group. She organised the retrieval of the papers from different libraries (e.g. university; hospital, research centre) and contacted a few authors of papers that could not be found. She screened retrieved papers against the inclusion criteria, ensured that all authors had access to all of the listed papers (e.g. sent them copies of the papers) and shared these papers among the authors for checking of quality assessment. She prepared an electronic checklist for the appraisal of the quality of papers and for the extraction of the data. She did the initial appraisal of the quality of all the listed papers and the extraction of the data. She wrote to authors of papers for additional information. She entered the details of the studies for inclusion and exclusion into Review Manager. She wrote the draft of the description of the characteristics of the included papers. She entered the data into Review Manager and did the data management, adapting the comparisons, the subgroups, the outcomes, the analysis, etc., in response to discussions among all authors. She wrote the first draft of the Results and Discussion sections as well as the Plain Language Summary and the Abstract.

Jane Sandall
JS contributed to the protocol by contributing to the design and writing. JS contributed to the design, screened retrieved papers against inclusion criteria and appraised quality of papers.

JS has been the contact author for the review since July 2006 and is joint first author of the review. Since 2006, she has co‐ordinated the review process, written to authors for additional information, managed data for the review, re‐extracted data from papers, re‐entered data into Review Manager, re‐entered data for the included studies section, analysed and interpreted data, and provided a clinical and policy perspective. She has rewritten the Plain Language Summary, Abstract, Background, Methods, Description of studies, Methodological quality, Results, Analysis, Discussion and wrote the final draft of the review.

JS revised the review in response to feedback from referees and the editor. When making the revisions, JS updated the search and identified four new reports, and contacted authors for additional data, which were assessed by JS and DD, and which she included in the revised version.

JS in the guarantor for the review.

Hora Soltani (HS)
HS contributed to the design and commented on the first draft of the protocol.

HS contributed to the development of the review by contributing to the design of the review, evaluation of the quality of the articles against the inclusion/exclusion criteria, data extraction, writing to authors for clarification of original article information, data interpretation, commenting on as well as writing the review.