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A trial was commissioned to evaluate the effectiveness of larval therapy to debride and heal sloughy and necrotic venous leg ulcers. Larval therapy in the trial was to be delivered in either loose or bagged fo...
Citation counts are often regarded as a measure of the utilization and contribution of published articles. The objective of this study is to assess whether statistical reporting and statistical errors in the a...
Health technology assessments of surgical interventions frequently require the inclusion of non-randomised evidence. Literature search strategies employed to identify this evidence often exclude a methodologic...
Disease specific mortality is often used as outcome rather than total mortality in clinical trials. This approach assumes that the classification of cause of death is unbiased. We explored whether use of funga...
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...
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...
Manuscript selection bias is the selective publication of manuscripts based on study characteristics other than quality indicators. One reason may be a perceived editorial bias against the researches from less...
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.
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...
Poor recruitment to randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is a widespread and important problem. With poor recruitment being such an important issue with respect to the conduct of randomised trials, a systematic...
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...
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