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The Quality of Reporting of Meta-analyses (QUOROM) statement provides guidance for improving the quality of reporting of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. To make the process of study selection transparent...
Journal impact factors and their ranks are used widely by journals, researchers, and research assessment exercises.
Although there have been reported benefits of health education interventions across various health issues, the key to program effectiveness is participation and retention. Unfortunately, not everyone is willin...
The lack of robust systems for monitoring quality in healthcare has been highlighted. Statistical process control (SPC) methods, utilizing the increasingly available routinely collected electronic patient reco...
Birth weight and length have seasonal fluctuations. Previous analyses of birth weight by latitude effects identified seemingly contradictory results, showing both 6 and 12 monthly periodicities in weight. The ...
In an effort to identify previously unrecognized aspects of editorial decision-making, we explored the words and phrases that one group of editors used during their meetings.
Disorders related to pregnancy and childbirth are a major health issue in South East Asia. They represent one of the biggest health risk differentials between the developed and developing world. Our broad rese...
Recruiting and retaining GPs for research can prove difficult, and may result in sub-optimal patient participation where GPs are required to recruit patients. Low participation rates may affect the validity of...
We aimed at assessing the degree of measurement error in essential fatty acid intakes from a food frequency questionnaire and the impact of correcting for such an error on precision and bias of odds ratios in ...
Our objective was to systematically assess the differences in features, results, and usability of currently available meta-analysis programs.
This study compares the Bayesian and frequentist (non-Bayesian) approaches in the modelling of the association between the risk of preterm birth and maternal proximity to hazardous waste and pollution from the...
The Bayesian approach is now widely recognised as a proper framework for analysing risk in health care. However, the traditional text-book Bayesian approach is in many cases difficult to implement, as it is ba...
The widespread international use of the 26-item WHO Quality of Life Instrument (WHOQOL-Bref) necessitates the assessment of its factor structure across cultures. For, alternative factor models may provide a be...
The purpose of this study was to validate the accuracy of an alternative cervical cancer test – visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) – by addressing possible imperfections in the gold standard through late...
There is confusion in the medical literature as to whether statistics should be reported in survey studies that query an entire population, as is often done in educational studies. Our objective was to determi...
Many studies conducted in health and social sciences collect individual level data as outcome measures. Usually, such data have a hierarchical structure, with patients clustered within physicians, and physicia...
Missing data is a challenging problem in many prognostic studies. Multiple imputation (MI) accounts for imputation uncertainty that allows for adequate statistical testing. We developed and tested a methodolog...
As every healthcare intervention carries some risk of harm, clinical decision making needs to be supported by a systematic assessment of the balance of benefit to harm. A systematic review that considers only ...
With the advent of high throughput genotyping technology and the information available via projects such as the human genome sequencing and the HapMap project, more and more data relevant to the study of genet...
The 'Hawthorne Effect' may be an important factor affecting the generalisability of clinical research to routine practice, but has been little studied. Hawthorne Effects have been reported in previous clinical...
Hierarchical modelling represents a statistical method used to analyze nested data, as those concerning patients afferent to different hospitals. Aim of this paper is to build a hierarchical regression model u...
Information overload, increasing time constraints, and inappropriate search strategies complicate the detection of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). The aim of this study was to provide clinicians with reco...
Data for health surveys are often collected using either mailed questionnaires, telephone interviews or a combination. Mode of data collection can affect the propensity to refuse to respond and result in diffe...
Understanding the relationships between physical activity (PA) and disease has become a major area of research interest. Activity monitors, devices that quantify free-living PA for prolonged periods of time (d...
There is much evidence to suggest that risk for common clinical disorders begins in foetal life. Exposure to environmental risk factors however is often not random. Many commonly used indices of prenatal adver...
To investigate the interchangeability of measures of disability and health-related quality of life (HRQL) by comparing their associations patterns with disease-related impairment measures in patients with a va...
The choice between paper data collection methods and electronic data collection (EDC) methods has become a key question for clinical researchers. There remains a need to examine potential benefits, efficiencie...
The ability to locate those sampled has important implications for response rates and thus the success of survey research. The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of locating women requiring tracin...
An important issue in prediction modeling of multivariate data is the measure of dependence structure. The use of Pearson's correlation as a dependence measure has several pitfalls and hence application of reg...
Claims data provide rapid indicators of SSIs for coronary artery bypass surgery and have been shown to successfully rank hospitals by SSI rates. We now operationalize this method for use by payers without tran...
Questionnaires are used routinely in clinical research to measure health status and quality of life. Questionnaire measurements are traditionally formally assessed by indices of reliability (the degree of meas...
Analyzing drop out rates and when they occur may give important information about the patient characteristics and trial characteristics that affect the overall uptake of an intervention.
Obesity and depression are two major diseases which are associated with many other health problems such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes mellitus, coronary heart disease, stroke, myocardial infarction, ...
Pragmatic randomised controlled trials are often used in primary care to evaluate the effect of a treatment strategy. In these trials it is difficult to achieve both high internal validity and high generalisab...
It is notoriously difficult to recruit patients to randomised controlled trials in primary care. This is particularly true when the disease process under investigation occurs relatively infrequently and must b...
A response to Parienti JJ, Verdon R and Massari V: Methodological standards in non-inferiority AIDS trials: moving from adherence to compliance. BMC Med Res Meth 2006, 6:46
Health surveys provide important information on the burden and secular trends of risk factors and disease. Several factors including survey and item non-response can affect data quality. There are few reports ...
Poor response rates to postal questionnaires can introduce bias and reduce the statistical power of a study. To improve response rates in our trial in primary care we tested the effect of introducing an uncond...
In most case control studies the hardest decision is the choice of the control group, as in the ideal control group the proportion exposed is the same as in the population that produced the cases.
Our objective was to develop an instrument to assess the methodological quality of systematic reviews, building upon previous tools, empirical evidence and expert consensus.
Alcohol consumption is commonly used as a primary outcome in randomized alcohol treatment studies. The distribution of alcohol consumption is highly skewed, particularly in subjects with alcohol dependence.
Little is known about the response mechanisms among survivors of disasters. We studied the selective attrition and possible bias in a longitudinal study among survivors of a fireworks disaster.
To explore the strengths and weaknesses of conventional biomedical research strategies and methods as applied to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and to suggest a new research framework for assess...
Often in survey research, subsets of the population invited to complete the survey do not respond in a timely manner and valuable resources are expended in recontact efforts. Various methods of improving respo...
Meta-analysis handles randomized trials with no outcome events in both treatment and control arms inconsistently, including them when risk difference (RD) is the effect measure but excluding them when relative...
The inclusion of qualitative studies in systematic reviews poses methodological challenges. This paper presents worked examples of two methods of data synthesis (textual narrative and thematic), used in relati...
When multiple endpoints are of interest in evidence synthesis, a multivariate meta-analysis can jointly synthesise those endpoints and utilise their correlation. A multivariate random-effects meta-analysis mus...
This paper describes the study protocol, the recruitment, and base-line data for evaluating the success of randomisation of the PRO-AGE (PRevention in Older people – Assessment in GEneralists' practices) project.
Health risk appraisal is a promising method for health promotion and prevention in older persons. The Health Risk Appraisal for the Elderly (HRA-E) developed in the U.S. has unique features but has not been te...
Reasons for attrition in studies vary, but may be a major concern in long-term studies if those who drop out differ systematically from those who continue to participate. Factors associated with dropout were e...
2022 Citation Impact
4.0 - 2-year Impact Factor
7.0 - 5-year Impact Factor
2.055 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
1.778 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
2023 Speed
40 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
210 days submission to accept (Median)
2023 Usage
4,638,094 downloads
3,126 Altmetric mentions
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency: Single anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: Review reports. Reviewer Identities reviewer opt in. Author/reviewer communication