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  1. Home ultraviolet B (UVB) treatment is a much-debated treatment, especially with regard to effectiveness, safety and side effects. However, it is increasingly being prescribed, especially in the Netherlands. De...

    Authors: Mayke BG Koek, Erik Buskens, Paul HA Steegmans, Huib van Weelden, Carla AFM Bruijnzeel-Koomen and Vigfús Sigurdsson

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:39

    Content type: Study protocol

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  2. Mathematical models are widely used for studying the dynamic of infectious agents such as hepatitis C virus (HCV). Most often, model parameters are estimated using standard least-square procedures for each ind...

    Authors: Rodolphe Thiébaut, Jérémie Guedj, Hélène Jacqmin-Gadda, Geneviève Chêne, Pascale Trimoulet, Didier Neau and Daniel Commenges

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:38

    Content type: Research article

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  3. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is the framework developed by WHO to describe functioning and disability at both the individual and population levels.

    Authors: Alarcos Cieza, Szilvia Geyh, Somnath Chatterji, Nenad Kostanjsek, Bedirhan T Üstün and Gerold Stucki

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:36

    Content type: Research article

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  4. Conventional systematic review techniques have limitations when the aim of a review is to construct a critical analysis of a complex body of literature. This article offers a reflexive account of an attempt to...

    Authors: Mary Dixon-Woods, Debbie Cavers, Shona Agarwal, Ellen Annandale, Antony Arthur, Janet Harvey, Ron Hsu, Savita Katbamna, Richard Olsen, Lucy Smith, Richard Riley and Alex J Sutton

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:35

    Content type: Technical advance

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  6. 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...

    Authors: Margaret Sampson, Li Zhang, Andra Morrison, Nicholas J Barrowman, Tammy J Clifford, Robert W Platt, Terry P Klassen and David Moher

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:33

    Content type: Research article

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  7. 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 ...

    Authors: Mandy Hildebrandt, Ralf Bender, Ulrich Gehrmann and Maria Blettner

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:32

    Content type: Research article

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  8. 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 ...

    Authors: Javier Zamora, Victor Abraira, Alfonso Muriel, Khalid Khan and Arri Coomarasamy

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:31

    Content type: Software

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  9. 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...

    Authors: Daniel Galandi, Guido Schwarzer and Gerd Antes

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:30

    Content type: Correspondence

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  10. 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...

    Authors: Harald Walach, Torkel Falkenberg, Vinjar Fønnebø, George Lewith and Wayne B Jonas

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:29

    Content type: Debate

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  11. 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...

    Authors: Shaun Treweek and Frank Sullivan

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:28

    Content type: Research article

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  12. 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...

    Authors: Beverley Shea, Maarten Boers, Jeremy M Grimshaw, Candyce Hamel and Lex M Bouter

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:27

    Content type: Research article

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  13. 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...

    Authors: Pieter M Kroonenberg, Frans J Oort, Glenn T Stebbins, Sue E Leurgans, Esther Cubo and Christopher G Goetz

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:26

    Content type: Research article

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  15. 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...

    Authors: Mohamed M Shoukri, Nasser Elkum and Stephen D Walter

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:24

    Content type: Research article

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  19. Proper estimation of sample size requirements for cluster-based studies requires estimates of the intra-cluster correlation coefficient (ICC) for the variables of interest.

    Authors: Benjamin Littenberg and Charles D MacLean

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:20

    Content type: Research article

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  21. 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...

    Authors: Rodney A Hayward, David M Kent, Sandeep Vijan and Timothy P Hofer

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:18

    Content type: Research article

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  22. 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...

    Authors: Lydia Guittet, Philippe Ravaud and Bruno Giraudeau

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:17

    Content type: Research article

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  23. 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...

    Authors: Stuart Gilmour, Louisa Degenhardt, Wayne Hall and Carolyn Day

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:16

    Content type: Technical advance

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  24. 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...

    Authors: Dorothea Nitsch, Susan Morton, Bianca L DeStavola, Heather Clark and David A Leon

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:15

    Content type: Research article

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  25. 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...

    Authors: Brian H Rowe, Trevor L Strome, Carol Spooner, Sandra Blitz, Eric Grafstein and Andrew Worster

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:14

    Content type: Research article

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  26. 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...

    Authors: Emil Kupek

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:13

    Content type: Research article

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  27. 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...

    Authors: Nynke Smidt, Anne WS Rutjes, Daniëlle AWM van der Windt, Raymond WJG Ostelo, Patrick M Bossuyt, Johannes B Reitsma, Lex M Bouter and Henrica CW de Vet

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:12

    Content type: Research article

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  28. 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...

    Authors: Angie Wade, Huiqi Pan, Simon Eaton, Agostino Pierro and Evelyn Ong

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:11

    Content type: Research article

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  30. 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...

    Authors: Penny F Whiting, Marie E Weswood, Anne WS Rutjes, Johannes B Reitsma, Patrick NM Bossuyt and Jos Kleijnen

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:9

    Content type: Research article

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  31. 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...

    Authors: Winston R Chang and Ian P McLean

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:8

    Content type: Research article

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  32. 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...

    Authors: Margaret Sampson, Nicholas J Barrowman, David Moher, Tammy J Clifford, Robert W Platt, Andra Morrison, Terry P Klassen and Li Zhang

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:7

    Content type: Research article

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  33. 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...

    Authors: Baohui Yang and Margo Eyeson-Annan

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:6

    Content type: Research article

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  34. 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...

    Authors: Rachel A Nakash, Jane L Hutton, Ellen C Jørstad-Stein, Simon Gates and Sarah E Lamb

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:5

    Content type: Research article

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  35. 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.

    Authors: Hannah Kuper, Amanda Nicholson and Harry Hemingway

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:4

    Content type: Research article

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  37. 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...

    Authors: LB Mokkink, CB Terwee, DL Knol, PW Stratford, J Alonso, DL Patrick, LM Bouter and HCW de Vet

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:2

    Content type: Study protocol

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  38. 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...

    Authors: Peyman Jafari, Seyyed Mohammad Taghi Ayatollahi and Javad Behboodian

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2006 6:1

    Content type: Research article

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  39. 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...

    Authors: Ralitsa B Akins, Homer Tolson and Bryan R Cole

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:37

    Content type: Research article

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  42. 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 ...

    Authors: Sarah Cockayne and David J Torgerson

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:34

    Content type: Research article

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  43. 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...

    Authors: Simon D French, Steve McDonald, Joanne E McKenzie and Sally E Green

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:33

    Content type: Research article

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  45. 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...

    Authors: Iréne Lund, Thomas Lundeberg, Louise Sandberg, Cecilia Norrbrink Budh, Jan Kowalski and Elisabeth Svensson

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:31

    Content type: Research article

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  46. 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...

    Authors: Markus Neuhäuser and Frank Bretz

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:30

    Content type: Research article

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  47. 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...

    Authors: Farid Zayeri, Anoshirvan Kazemnejad, Navid Khanafshar and Fatemeh Nayeri

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:29

    Content type: Research article

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  49. 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...

    Authors: Yukie Nakai, Peter Milgrom, Toshiko Yoshida, Chikako Ishihara and Tsutomu Shimono

    Citation: BMC Medical Research Methodology 2005 5:27

    Content type: Research article

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