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Search filters or hedges play an important role in evidence-based medicine but their development depends on the availability of a "gold standard" – a reference standard against which to establish the performan...
Standard effect measures such as risk difference and attributable risk are frequently used in epidemiological studies and public health research to describe the effect of exposures. Recently, so-called impact ...
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses of test accuracy studies are increasingly being recognised as central in guiding clinical practice. However, there is currently no dedicated and comprehensive software for ...
In order to reduce systematic errors (such as language bias) and increase the precision of the summary treatment effect estimate, a comprehensive identification of randomised controlled trials (RCT), irrespect...
The reasoning behind evaluating medical interventions is that a hierarchy of methods exists which successively produce improved and therefore more rigorous evidence based medicine upon which to make clinical d...
The UK Medical Research Council has proposed that complex interventions should be tested in exploratory trials prior to a full-scale trial so as to better define the intervention and test the feasibility of co...
Systematic reviews (SRs) must be of high quality. The purpose of our research was to compare the methodological and reporting quality of original versus updated Cochrane SRs to determine whether updating had i...
In order to better understand the similarities and differences in the motor behaviour of different groups of patients, their scores on the Motor Examination section of the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Sc...
The "real" effect size of a medical therapy is constant over time. In contrast, the effect size reported in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) may change over time because the sum of all kinds of bias influen...
In this paper we propose the use of the within-subject coefficient of variation as an index of a measurement's reliability. For continuous variables and based on its maximum likelihood estimation we derive a v...
The Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy (HSSS), which contains three phases, is widely used to identify Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in MEDLINE. Lefebvre and Clarke suggest that reviewers might co...
In order to carry out a methodological research survey of systematic reviews of adverse effects we needed to retrieve a sample of systematic reviews in which the primary outcome is an adverse effect or effects.
The effects of measurement error in epidemiological exposures and confounders on estimated effects of exposure are well described, but the effects on estimates for gene-environment interactions has received ra...
Proper estimation of sample size requirements for cluster-based studies requires estimates of the intra-cluster correlation coefficient (ICC) for the variables of interest.
It has been demonstrated that the enclosure of money with a mailed questionnaire increases the response rate significantly. We evaluated scratch lottery tickets as an alternative to cash.
When subgroup analyses of a positive clinical trial are unrevealing, such findings are commonly used to argue that the treatment's benefits apply to the entire study population; however, such analyses are ofte...
Cluster randomization design is increasingly used for the evaluation of health-care, screeening or educational interventions. At the planning stage, sample size calculations usually consider an average cluster...
Intervention time series analysis (ITSA) is an important method for analysing the effect of sudden events on time series data. ITSA methods are quasi-experimental in nature and the validity of modelling with t...
Probabilistic record linkage is widely used in epidemiology, but studies of its validity are rare. Our aim was to validate its use to identify births to a cohort of women, being drawn from a large cohort of pe...
The purpose of this study was to determine the inter-rater agreement between reviewers on the quality of abstract submissions to an annual national scientific meeting (Canadian Association of Emergency Physici...
Structural equation modelling (SEM) has been increasingly used in medical statistics for solving a system of related regression equations. However, a great obstacle for its wider use has been its difficulty in...
In January 2003, STAndards for the Reporting of Diagnostic accuracy studies (STARD) were published in a number of journals, to improve the quality of reporting in diagnostic accuracy studies. We designed a stu...
Minimisation can be used within treatment trials to ensure that prognostic factors are evenly distributed between treatment groups. The technique is relatively straightforward to apply but does require running...
Systematic reviews can serve as a tool in translation of basic life sciences research from laboratory to human research and healthcare. The extent to which reviews of animal research are systematic and unbiase...
A quality assessment tool for diagnostic accuracy studies, named QUADAS, has recently been developed. Although QUADAS has been used in several systematic reviews, it has not been formally validated. The object...
Modern day clinical practice demands evidence justifying our choice of treatment methods. Cumulative sum techniques (cusum) are amongst the simplest statistical methods known. They provide rapid analysis and i...
Most electronic search efforts directed at identifying primary studies for inclusion in systematic reviews rely on the optimal Boolean search features of search interfaces such as DIALOG® and Ovid™. Our objective...
Computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) is widely used for health surveys. The advantages of CATI over face-to-face interviewing are timeliness and cost reduction to achieve the same sample size and ge...
Postal self-completion questionnaires offer one of the least expensive modes of collecting patient based outcomes in health care research. The purpose of this review is to assess the efficacy of methods of inc...
PubMed is the most widely used method for searches of the medical literature, but fails to identify many relevant articles. Electronic citation tracking offers an alternative search method.
Although the methods for conducting systematic reviews of efficacy are well established, there is much less guidance on how systematic reviews of adverse effects should be performed.
Choosing an adequate measurement instrument depends on the proposed use of the instrument, the concept to be measured, the measurement properties (e.g. internal consistency, reproducibility, content and constr...
In clinical trials, both unequal randomization design and sequential analyses have ethical and economic advantages. In the single-stage-design (SSD), however, if the sample size is not adjusted based on unequa...
Delphi surveys with panels of experts in a particular area of interest have been widely utilized in the fields of clinical medicine, nursing practice, medical education and healthcare services. Despite this wi...
To estimate a threshold limit value for a compound known to have harmful health effects, an 'elbow' threshold model is usually applied. We are interested on non-parametric flexible alternatives.
It has generally been argued that parametric statistics should not be applied to data with non-normal distributions. Empirical research has demonstrated that Mann-Whitney generally has greater power than the t-te...
Postal questionnaires are widely used to collect outcome data on participants. However, a poor response to questionnaires will reduce the statistical power of the study and may introduce bias. A meta analysis ...
Cochrane systematic reviews aim to provide readers with the most up-to-date evidence on the effects of healthcare interventions. The policy of updating Cochrane reviews every two years consumes valuable time a...
The location quotient (LQ) ratio, a measure designed to quantify and benchmark the degree of relative concentration of an activity in the analysis of area localization, has received considerable attention in t...
Rating scales like the visual analogue scale, VAS, and the verbal rating scale, VRS, are often used for pain assessments both in clinical work and in research, despite the lack of a gold standard. Interchangea...
Adaptive designs are becoming increasingly important in clinical research. One approach subdivides the study into several (two or more) stages and combines the p-values of the different stages using Fisher's comb...
For analyzing a repeated ordinal response, it is common to use a multivariate cumulative logit model. This model may fit poorly, especially when a nonsymmetric response is available. In these cases, alternativ...
The counterfactual or potential outcome model has become increasingly standard for causal inference in epidemiological and medical studies.
This study assessed the application of the Total Design Method (TDM) in a mail survey of Japanese dentists. The TDM was chosen because survey response rates in Japan are unacceptably low and the TDM had previo...
Placebo response rates in clinical trials vary considerably and are observed frequently. For new drugs it can be difficult to prove effectiveness superior to placebo. It is unclear what contributes to improvem...
Cluster randomization design is increasingly used for the evaluation of health-care, screening or educational interventions. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) defines the clustering effect and be sp...
Systematic reviewers seek to comprehensively search for relevant studies and summarize these to present the most valid estimate of intervention effectiveness. The more resources searched, the higher the yield,...
It is generally believed that exhaustive searches of bibliographic databases are needed for systematic reviews of health care interventions. The CENTRAL database of controlled trials (RCTs) has been built up b...
In order to detect potential disease clusters where a putative source cannot be specified, classical procedures scan the geographical area with circular windows through a specified grid imposed to the map. How...
Prediction intervals can be calculated for predicting cancer incidence on the basis of a statistical model. These intervals include the uncertainty of the parameter estimates and variations in future rates but...
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)
2022 Speed
29 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
175 days submission to accept (Median)
2022 Usage
4,429,699 downloads
14,945 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