Medical chart reviews are often used in emergency medicine research. However, the reliability of data abstracted by chart reviews is seldom examined critically. The objective of this investigation was to determine the proportion of emergency medicine research articles that use data from chart reviews and the proportions that report methods of case selection, abstractor training, monitoring and blinding, and interrater agreement. Chart review is a common method of data collection in emergency medicine research. Yet, information about the quality of the data is usually lacking. Chart reviews should be held to higher methodologic standards, or the conclusions of these studies may be in error.

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