Individual participant data meta-analyses (IPD-MAs) have several benefits over standard aggregate data meta-analyses, including the consideration of additional participants, follow-up time, and the joint consideration of study- and participant-level heterogeneity for improved diagnostic and prognostic model development and evaluation. However,…

Population-adjusted indirect comparisons, developed in the 2010s, enable comparisons between two treatments in different studies by balancing patient characteristics in the case where individual patient-level data (IPD) are available for only one study. Health technology assessment (HTA) bodies increasingly rely on these methods to inform funding…

Systematic reviews (SRs) have an important role in the healthcare decision-making practice. Assessing the overall confidence in the results of SRs using quality assessment tools, such as "A MeaSurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2" (AMSTAR 2), is crucial since not all SRs are conducted using the most rigorous methods. In this…

Component network meta-analysis (CNMA) compares treatments comprising multiple components and estimates the effects of individual components. For network meta-analysis, a standard network plot with nodes for treatments and edges for direct comparisons between treatments is drawn to visualize the evidence structure and the connections between…

Some patients benefit from a treatment while others may do so less or do not benefit at all. We have previously developed a two-stage network meta-regression prediction model that synthesized randomized trials and evaluates how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics. In this article, we extended this model to combine different…

Systematic reviewers are advised to search trials registers to minimise risk of reporting biases. However, there has been little research on the impact of searching trials registers on the results of meta-analyses. We aimed to evaluate the impact of searching clinical trials registers for systematic reviews of pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical…

Outputs from living evidence syntheses projects have been used widely during the pandemic by guideline developers to form evidence-based recommendations. However, the needs of different stakeholders cannot be accommodated by solely providing pre-defined non amendable numerical summaries. Stakeholders also need to understand the data and perform…

The amount of grey literature and 'softer' intelligence from social media or websites is vast. Given the long lead-times of producing high-quality peer-reviewed health information, this is causing a demand for new ways to provide prompt input for secondary research. To our knowledge, this is the first review of automated data extraction methods or…

A systematic review is a type of literature review that aims to collect and analyse all available evidence from the literature on a particular topic. The process of screening and identifying eligible articles from the vast amounts of literature is a time-consuming task. Specialised software has been developed to aid in the screening process and…

Using the Hartung-Knapp method and 95% prediction intervals (PIs) in random-effects meta-analyses is recommended by experts but rarely applied. Therefore, we aimed to reevaluate statistically significant meta-analyses using the Hartung-Knapp method and 95% PIs. In this methodological study, three databases were searched from January 2010 to July…

Cochrane reviews are known to be a high-quality source of evidence synthesis supporting health care decisions. In a recently conducted study, we analyzed the trends in epidemiology and reporting of published systematic reviews over the last 20 years. This sample of 1132 systematic reviews included 84 Cochrane reviews. We have learned several…

Searching for trials is a key task in systematic reviews and a focus of automation. Previous approaches required knowing examples of relevant trials in advance, and most methods are focused on published trial articles. To complement existing tools, we compared methods for finding relevant trial registrations given a International Prospective…

Often clinicians are interested in determining whether a subject's measurement falls within a normal range, defined as a range of values of a continuous outcome which contains some proportion (eg, 95%) of measurements from a healthy population. Several studies in the biomedical field have estimated reference ranges based on a meta-analysis of…

Reference intervals, or reference ranges, aid medical decision-making by containing a pre-specified proportion (e.g., 95%) of the measurements in a representative healthy population. We recently proposed three approaches for estimating a reference interval from a meta-analysis based on a random effects model: a frequentist approach, a Bayesian…

A "P" value, or the magnitude or direction of results can influence decisions about whether, when, and how research findings are disseminated. Regardless of whether an entire study or a particular study result is unavailable because investigators considered the results to be unfavorable, bias in a meta-analysis may occur when available…