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Adequate participant recruitment is vital to the conduct of a clinical trial. Projected recruitment rates are often over-estimated, and the time to recruit the target population (accrual period) is often under...
Cluster randomised trials can be susceptible to a range of methodological problems. These problems are not commonly recognised by many researchers. In this paper we discuss the issues that can lead to bias in ...
To adequately assess individual studies and synthesize quantitative research on weight loss studies, transparent reporting of data is required. The authors examined the reporting quality of randomized trials i...
The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of study quality assessment of primary studies in cancer practice guidelines.
To determine if the search technique that is used to sample randomized controlled trial (RCT) manuscripts from a field of medical science can influence the measurement of the change in quality over time in tha...
Failure to be comprehensive can distort the results of a systematic review. Conversely, extensive searches may yield unmanageable number of citations of which only few may be relevant. Knowledge of usefulness ...
Epidemiological studies of exposures that vary with time require an additional level of methodological complexity to account for the time-dependence of exposure. This study compares a nested case-control appro...
There is analytical potential for multiple cause of death data collected from death certificates. This study examines relationships of multiple causes of death as a function of factors available on the death c...
In 2003, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a guidance document on the scope of "Part 11" enforcement. In this guidance document, the FDA indicates an expectation of a risk-based app...
Methodological research to support searching for those doing systematic reviews of epidemiological studies is a relatively neglected area. Our aim was to determine how many databases it is necessary to search ...
Browne et al. [Browne, MacCallum, Kim, Andersen, Glaser: When fit indices and residuals are incompatible. Psychol Methods 2002] employed a structural equation model of measurements of target cell lysing by nat...
Cluster sample study designs are cost effective, however cluster samples violate the simple random sample assumption of independence of observations. Failure to account for the intra-cluster correlation of obs...
We describe a system of web applications designed to streamline the interdisciplinary collaboration in outcomes research.
Many medical specialities have reviewed the statistical content of their journals. To our knowledge this has not been done in general practice. Given the main role of a general practitioner as a diagnostician ...
Consider a meta-analysis where a 'head-to-head' comparison of diagnostic tests for a disease of interest is intended. Assume there are two or more tests available for the disease, where each test has been stud...
Typically, randomization software should allow users to exert control over the different aspects of randomization including block design, provision of unique identifiers and control over the format and type of...
The habitual "any other comments" general open question at the end of structured questionnaires has the potential to increase response rates, elaborate responses to closed questions, and allow respondents to i...
There is a common belief that most cancer prevention trials should be restricted to high-risk subjects in order to increase statistical power. This strategy is appropriate if the ultimate target population is ...
In most recent large efficacy trials of barrier contraceptive methods, a high proportion of participants withdrew before the intended end of follow-up. The objective of this analysis was to explore characteris...
Consumers of research (researchers, administrators, educators and clinicians) frequently use standard critical appraisal tools to evaluate the quality of published research reports. However, there is no consen...
Several reviews of published cluster randomised trials have reported that about half did not take clustering into account in the analysis, which was thus incorrect and potentially misleading. In this paper I a...
Publication bias, as typically defined, refers to the decreased likelihood of studies' results being published when they are near the null, not statistically significant, or otherwise "less interesting." But c...
Balanced decisions about health care interventions require reliable evidence on harms as well as benefits. Most systematic reviews focus on efficacy and randomised trials, for which the methodology is well est...
Recently developed measures such as I 2 and H allow the evaluation of the impact of heterogeneity in conventional meta-analyses. There has been no examination of the development of heterogeneity in the context of...
Meta-analysis can be used to pool rate measures across studies, but challenges arise when follow-up duration varies. Our objective was to compare different statistical approaches for pooling count data of vary...
Reducing maternal mortality and morbidity are among the key international development goals. A prerequisite for monitoring the progress towards attainment of these goals is accurate assessment of the levels of...
The prevalence of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in many developed countries appears to be increasing. There is some evidence from Latin America that COPD is a growing cause of death, but informa...
Current methods of measuring the quality of journals assume that citations of articles within journals are normally distributed. Furthermore using journal impact factors to measure the quality of individual ar...
Given an observed test statistic and its degrees of freedom, one may compute the observed P value with most statistical packages. It is unknown to what extent test statistics and P values are congruent in publish...
In recent years there has been increased interest in evaluating breast cancer screening using data from before-and-after studies in multiple geographic regions. One approach, not previously mentioned, is the p...
Rating scales form an important means of gathering evaluation data. Since important decisions are often based on these evaluations, determining the reliability of rating data can be critical. Most commonly use...
The use of preference-based measures in the evaluation of health outcomes has extended considerably over the last decade. Their alleged advantage over other types of general instruments in the evaluation of he...
Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that there are many situations where the use of a cluster randomized trial may be more appropriate than an individually randomized trial. Similarly, the need for appro...
Patient recruitment is one of the most difficult aspects of clinical trials, especially for research involving elderly subjects. In this paper, we describe our experience with patient recruitment for the behav...
We sought to improve upon previously published statistical modeling strategies for binary classification of dyslipidemia for general population screening purposes based on the waist-to-hip circumference ratio ...
The purpose of this study was to determine the standard tasks performed by clinical research coordinators (CRCs) in oncology clinical trials.
Qualitative research makes an important contribution to our understanding of health and healthcare. However, qualitative evidence can be difficult to search for and identify, and the effectiveness of different...
Two main pathways exist for the development of knowledge in clinical homeopathy. These comprise clinical trials conducted primarily by university-based researchers and cases reports and homeopathic "provings" ...
Researchers from the developing world contribute only a limited proportion to the total research output published in leading medical education journals. Some of them believe that there is a substantial editori...
Effective strategies for implementing best practices in low and middle income countries are needed. RHL is an annually updated electronic publication containing Cochrane systematic reviews, commentaries and pr...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2003 3:8
Controlled clinical trials of health care interventions are either explanatory or pragmatic. Explanatory trials test whether an intervention is efficacious; that is, whether it can have a beneficial effect in ...
This paper demonstrates how structural equation modelling (SEM) can be used as a tool to aid in carrying out power analyses. For many complex multivariate designs that are increasingly being employed, power an...
The evaluation of more than one intervention in the same randomised controlled trial can be achieved using a parallel group design. However this requires increased sample size and can be inefficient, especiall...
In the era of evidence based medicine, with systematic reviews as its cornerstone, adequate quality assessment tools should be available. There is currently a lack of a systematically developed and evaluated t...
Public health research involving social or kin groups (such as sexual partners or family members), rather than samples of unrelated individuals, has become more widespread in response to social ecological appr...
The original article was published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2002 2:13
In many randomized and non-randomized comparative trials, researchers measure a continuous endpoint repeatedly in order to decrease intra-patient variability and thus increase statistical power. There has been...
Cross-sectional studies with binary outcomes analyzed by logistic regression are frequent in the epidemiological literature. However, the odds ratio can importantly overestimate the prevalence ratio, the measu...
While the desirability of interdisciplinary inquiry has been widely acknowledged, indeed has become 'the mantra of science policy', the methods of interdisciplinary collaboration are opaque to outsiders and gener...
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