Background. Systematic reviews and meta-analysis often cometo conflicting conclusions on key issues and have a number ofpotentially important methodological limitations. A metareviewrepresents one approach to a descriptive investigation of suchissues in review literatures; this involves a systematic review ofpreviously published reviews. Metareviews report on the areasthat systematic reviews and meta-analyses have covered, investigatingthe methodological quality of such reviews, comparingmethods for reporting results with recommended standards inthe field of systematic reviewing and highlighting areas whichcould benefit from further research.Objective.The present report was aimed at critically examiningthe reporting quality of available medical metareviews andencouraging the use of such innovative approach to develop aninstrument for assessing metareviews’ methodological quality.Materials and methods. PsycINFO, MEDLINE, EMBASE, andCINAHL were searched for previous medical metareviews as ofFebruary 11th, 2012. References regarding identified reports andannotated bibliographies were used to supplement the search.Results. Four metareviews meeting the inclusion criteriawere identified and descriptively analysed. The first set ofstandardised metareview reporting guidelines’ checklist (metareviewassessment of reporting quality - MARQ), usingquality checklists developed for primary studies and reviewsas models, was introduced to enable transparent and consistentreporting of metareview methodology. An average of 15 (SD =3) MARQ criteria were met when applied to the four metareviewsidentified during the systematic search. This indicated amoderate level of reporting quality which should be improvedin subsequent applications of the methodology by using thestandardised checklist. A high level of inter-rater agreementwas found (κ = 0.93).Conclusion. The standardised set of guidelines outlined inthis report should assist future researchers in conducting moretransparent and methodologically rigorous metareviews