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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...
The aim of this article is to explore ways in which selection bias and ascertainment bias can be reduced and investigated in trials, by using the example of a drug trial carried out in both developed and devel...
Misconduct in medical research has been the subject of many papers in recent years. Among different types of misconduct, data fabrication might be considered as one of the most severe cases. There have been so...
The Anglia Menorrhagia Education Study (AMES) is a randomized controlled trial testing the effectiveness of an education package applied to general practices. Binary data are available from two sources; genera...
There is common belief among some medical researchers that if a potential surrogate endpoint is highly correlated with a true endpoint, then a positive (or negative) difference in potential surrogate endpoints...
Techniques for interim analysis, the statistical analysis of results while they are still accumulating, are highly-developed in the setting of clinical trials. But in the setting of laboratory experiments such...
The electronic version of the British Medical Journal (eBMJ) has a unique feature in that it provides an electronic record of the number of times an article has been viewed ("hits") in the week after its publi...
As an increasingly large number of meta-analyses are published, quantitative methods are needed to help clinicians and systematic review teams determine when meta-analyses are not up to date.
It has been estimated that about 45% of abstracts that are accepted for presentation at biomedical meetings will subsequently be published in full. The acceptance of abstracts at meetings and their fate after ...
When evaluating cancer screening it is important to estimate the cumulative risk of false positives from periodic screening. Because the data typically come from studies in which the number of screenings varie...
Randomized trials stochastically answer the question. "What would be the effect of treatment on outcome if one turned back the clock and switched treatments in the given population?" Generalizations to other s...
All quantifications of mortality, morbidity, and other health measures involve numerous sources of error. The routine quantification of random sampling error makes it easy to forget that other sources of error...
Many randomized trials involve missing binary outcomes. Although many previous adjustments for missing binary outcomes have been proposed, none of these makes explicit use of randomization to bound the bias wh...
The Erratum to this article has been published in BMC Medical Research Methodology 2004 4:1
Randomised controlled clinical trials are performed to resolve uncertainty concerning comparator interventions. Appropriate acknowledgment of uncertainty enables the concurrent achievement of two goals : the a...
Phase II cancer studies are undertaken to assess the activity of a new drug or a new treatment regimen. Activity is sometimes defined in terms of a survival probability, a binary outcome such as one-year survi...
The Bayesian approach is one alternative for estimating correlation coefficients in which knowledge from previous studies is incorporated to improve estimation. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the u...
Because randomized cancer screening trials are very expensive, observational cancer screening studies can play an important role in the early phases of screening evaluation. Periodic screening evaluation (PSE)...
Little work has been done to investigate the suggestion that the use of selected scales from a multi-scale health-status questionnaire would compromise reliability and validity. The aim of this study was to co...
The evaluation of abstracts for scientific meetings has been shown to suffer from poor inter observer reliability. A measure was developed to assess the formal quality of abstract submissions in a standardized...
Disease registers aim to collect information about all instances of a disease or condition in a defined population of individuals. Traditionally methods of operating disease registers have required that notifi...
Citation Impact
4.622 - 2-year Impact Factor (2021)
6.727 - 5-year Impact Factor (2021)
2.742 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
1.933 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
Speed
48 days to first decision for all manuscripts (Median)
58 days to first decision for reviewed manuscripts only (Median)
Usage
4,455,062 Downloads (2021)
2,060 Altmetric mentions (2021)
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