On 2015 May 15, M Felix Freshwater commented:

Although not called a systematic review, in fact it was one for two obvious reasons: 1. Systematic reviews are defined by Cochrane as analyses of articles with “a clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies”. The authors’ stated objective was “to identify the most highly cited microsurgery articles”, and the authors’ pre-defined eligibility criteria included articles that appeared in five high-impact peer-reviewed journals. 2. It was assigned a Level of evidence III. Using the ASPS level of evidence system a level III is a systematic review of retrospective cohort or comparative study; case-control studies; or while according to 2009 OCEBM level 3 is a systematic review of case control studies.<br />This review does not meet the minimum standards on how a proper systematic review should be reported that were codified in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and published in 2009.<br> Item 10 of PRISMA’s checklist describes the proper methodology for validating extracted data: “Describe … any processes for … confirming data from investigators.” The authors did not describe how they confirmed that their data extraction was accurate. AMSTAR, a validated checklist for measuring the quality of systematic reviews states: “There should be at least two independent data extractors and a consensus procedure for disagreements should be in place.” This review contains erroneous data, which may be a result of not reading the original papers and/or of not complying with PRISMA. One obvious example is the misidentification of the country of origin of the most highly cited clinical article. While the review stated that the country of origin was the United Kingdom, the paper itself never uses the phrase “United Kingdom” and clearly identifies its country of origin as Australia on its first and final pages. As this review deemed it worthy to analyze papers by country, any results and conclusions based upon country of origin are suspect. Without duplicating the study, it is impossible for any reader to know which other data in this review are flawed. This review provides an educational opportunity, as it affords the editors and peer reviewers to join other journals that publish papers on microsurgery including Annals of Plastic Surgery, Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery, Journal of Hand Surgery (Am) and Journal of Hand Surgery (Euro), which have adopted PRISMA as a requirement when reporting systematic reviews. I suggest that the editor, who also is a co-author of this paper, enforce the use of PRISMA in order to lessen the possibility of future errors arising from inaccurate data extraction.

On 2015 May 15, M Felix Freshwater commented:

Although not called a systematic review, in fact it was one for two obvious reasons: 1. Systematic reviews are defined by Cochrane as analyses of articles with “a clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies”. The authors’ stated objective was “to identify the most highly cited microsurgery articles”, and the authors’ pre-defined eligibility criteria included articles that appeared in five high-impact peer-reviewed journals. 2. It was assigned a Level of evidence III. Using the ASPS level of evidence system a level III is a systematic review of retrospective cohort or comparative study; case-control studies; or while according to 2009 OCEBM level 3 is a systematic review of case control studies.<br />This review does not meet the minimum standards on how a proper systematic review should be reported that were codified in the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and published in 2009.<br> Item 10 of PRISMA’s checklist describes the proper methodology for validating extracted data: “Describe … any processes for … confirming data from investigators.” The authors did not describe how they confirmed that their data extraction was accurate. AMSTAR, a validated checklist for measuring the quality of systematic reviews states: “There should be at least two independent data extractors and a consensus procedure for disagreements should be in place.” This review contains erroneous data, which may be a result of not reading the original papers and/or of not complying with PRISMA. One obvious example is the misidentification of the country of origin of the most highly cited clinical article. While the review stated that the country of origin was the United Kingdom, the paper itself never uses the phrase “United Kingdom” and clearly identifies its country of origin as Australia on its first and final pages. As this review deemed it worthy to analyze papers by country, any results and conclusions based upon country of origin are suspect. Without duplicating the study, it is impossible for any reader to know which other data in this review are flawed. This review provides an educational opportunity, as it affords the editors and peer reviewers to join other journals that publish papers on microsurgery including Annals of Plastic Surgery, Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery, Journal of Hand Surgery (Am) and Journal of Hand Surgery (Euro), which have adopted PRISMA as a requirement when reporting systematic reviews. I suggest that the editor, who also is a co-author of this paper, enforce the use of PRISMA in order to lessen the possibility of future errors arising from inaccurate data extraction.