Review : Inter and intra-reader agreement among audiologists in reading auditory brainstem response waves = Revue : Concordances entre audiologistes et chez le même audiologiste pour la lecture des ondes des potentiels évoqués auditifs du tronc cérébral

This paper presents a review conducted to evaluate the scientific evidence regarding variability in audiologists' interpretation of auditory brainstem response (ABR) tests and to determine the factors that may affect audiologists' performance when reading ABRs. A search of the literature on Pubmed, Medline (Ovid), ScienceDirect and Google scholar yielded 4,735 articles. After culling, only six articles remained which investigated audiologists' variability in interpreting ABR, and the findings were inconsistent. Four of the six studies reported evidence that audiologists were variable when reading ABR waves, while two studies reported that audiologists were highly consistent when reading ABR waves. This conflict may be explained by the heterogeneity in the methods used in the six studies. More experienced audiologists were likely to show less variability in interpretation, but no other factors were shown to predict variability.