40 Chapter 2 Study selection Studies were selected independently by PPGM and BKHLB using Rayyan software (Rayyan Systems Inc. [55]) in three phases: title screening, abstract screening and full text screening. In the title screening, clearly irrelevant articles (not about burn injury) were excluded. During the abstract screening, studies involving animal skin burns that contained primary data were selected and reviews, posters and conference abstracts were excluded. In the full text screening, we selected articles involving animal thermal burns with outcome measures related to immune cells, and without co-interventions that interfere with the function of the immune system, such as infection or anti-inflammatory medication. Also, the presence of an appropriate control group (either healthy animals, baseline measures or sham controls) was verified. Discrepancies between the two reviewers were carefully checked and in case of doubt, references were included. Inaccessible articles were noted (Supplementary File 2) and excluded from the review. Study characteristics Independently, PPGM and BKHLB extracted the study characteristics (animal species and strain, age, sex, weight, burn size, burn time, burn agent, burn temperature, burn depth, anatomical location, type of control, cell type, detection method), each from half of the included studies. A random sample of 10% of the extracted data was checked by the other reviewer. Study quality and RoB assessment The reporting of any form of randomization or blinding and the presence of a conflictof-interest statement was scored for all included studies by PPGM and BKHLB who both assessed half of the studies and checked at least 10% of the other reviewer. Full RoB assessment was conducted using SYRCLE’s tool [45] on 25 randomly selected studies (random number generator in Excel). We evaluated the reporting of the following baseline characteristics: animal sex, age or weight (reporting of a range of < 10% was considered as low risk of bias). To check the completeness of outcome reporting, we evaluated the number of animals in the method and the results section for each experiment and outcome. The RoB was evaluated independently by PPGM and BKHLB. In the case of discrepancies, a third reviewer was consulted. This assessment provided an indication of the RoB of all included studies. Because only items 7, 8 and 9 from the RoB tool apply to baseline controlled studies, we evaluated those studies separately. Outcome data extraction All quantitative outcome measures related to immune cells, such as immune cell counts and cell function were collected in a database, which is available upon request. PPGM and BKHLB independently extracted the outcome measures (mean outcome and standard
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