Background: In order to provide appropriate treatment policies and strategies for male infertility in each region, it is necessary to know the affecting factors. However, to the clinical application of the result of the various studies in this field, the accuracy of the results must be ensured. Critical appraisal is an essential skill in performing evidence-based practice to integrate the best evidence in clinical care.
Objective: The aim of this study was a critical appraisal of the published studies on the factors affecting male infertility in Iran.
Materials and Methods: Male infertility-related articles in Iran were extracted from PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, SID databases with no time limitation, then were evaluated for the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Finally, 7 articles in the English language and 7 articles in the Persian language were appraised. For this purpose, the JBI checklist consisting of 9 different sections was used. The minimum and maximum points that could be obtained for each study ranged from 0 to 9. The overall quality of the articles was classified into three areas: good, average, and poor.
Results: Evaluated articles were indexed in online databases between the years of 2008 and 2018 as follows: 50% in PubMed (7 articles), 57/1% in Scopus (8 articles), 71/4% in Google Scholar (10 articles), and 21/4% in SID (3 articles). The results revealed that 11 articles (78/6%) had good quality, and 3 articles (21/4%) had average quality. Totally, 6 articles were in compliance with all sections of the JBI checklist. Only in 50% of the articles, a suitable sampling method was used.
Conclusion: The quality of published article reports on male infertility factors in Iran were average and good. To improve the quality of articles as much as possible, it is suggested that researchers apply standard instructions in writing articles. Also, in order to development the simplest and most complete checklist, it is suggested that with different checklists evaluated similar studies, so we will be enable to appraised articles in a short time, critically.
Key words: Epidemiology, Factor, Male infertility.