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There is much evidence to suggest that risk for common clinical disorders begins in foetal life. Exposure to environmental risk factors however is often not random. Many commonly used indices of prenatal adver...
To investigate the interchangeability of measures of disability and health-related quality of life (HRQL) by comparing their associations patterns with disease-related impairment measures in patients with a va...
The choice between paper data collection methods and electronic data collection (EDC) methods has become a key question for clinical researchers. There remains a need to examine potential benefits, efficiencie...
The ability to locate those sampled has important implications for response rates and thus the success of survey research. The purpose of this study was to examine predictors of locating women requiring tracin...
An important issue in prediction modeling of multivariate data is the measure of dependence structure. The use of Pearson's correlation as a dependence measure has several pitfalls and hence application of reg...
Claims data provide rapid indicators of SSIs for coronary artery bypass surgery and have been shown to successfully rank hospitals by SSI rates. We now operationalize this method for use by payers without tran...
Questionnaires are used routinely in clinical research to measure health status and quality of life. Questionnaire measurements are traditionally formally assessed by indices of reliability (the degree of meas...
Analyzing drop out rates and when they occur may give important information about the patient characteristics and trial characteristics that affect the overall uptake of an intervention.
Obesity and depression are two major diseases which are associated with many other health problems such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes mellitus, coronary heart disease, stroke, myocardial infarction, ...
Pragmatic randomised controlled trials are often used in primary care to evaluate the effect of a treatment strategy. In these trials it is difficult to achieve both high internal validity and high generalisab...
It is notoriously difficult to recruit patients to randomised controlled trials in primary care. This is particularly true when the disease process under investigation occurs relatively infrequently and must b...
A response to Parienti JJ, Verdon R and Massari V: Methodological standards in non-inferiority AIDS trials: moving from adherence to compliance. BMC Med Res Meth 2006, 6:46
Health surveys provide important information on the burden and secular trends of risk factors and disease. Several factors including survey and item non-response can affect data quality. There are few reports ...
Poor response rates to postal questionnaires can introduce bias and reduce the statistical power of a study. To improve response rates in our trial in primary care we tested the effect of introducing an uncond...
In most case control studies the hardest decision is the choice of the control group, as in the ideal control group the proportion exposed is the same as in the population that produced the cases.
Our objective was to develop an instrument to assess the methodological quality of systematic reviews, building upon previous tools, empirical evidence and expert consensus.
Alcohol consumption is commonly used as a primary outcome in randomized alcohol treatment studies. The distribution of alcohol consumption is highly skewed, particularly in subjects with alcohol dependence.
Little is known about the response mechanisms among survivors of disasters. We studied the selective attrition and possible bias in a longitudinal study among survivors of a fireworks disaster.
To explore the strengths and weaknesses of conventional biomedical research strategies and methods as applied to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and to suggest a new research framework for assess...
Often in survey research, subsets of the population invited to complete the survey do not respond in a timely manner and valuable resources are expended in recontact efforts. Various methods of improving respo...
Meta-analysis handles randomized trials with no outcome events in both treatment and control arms inconsistently, including them when risk difference (RD) is the effect measure but excluding them when relative...
The inclusion of qualitative studies in systematic reviews poses methodological challenges. This paper presents worked examples of two methods of data synthesis (textual narrative and thematic), used in relati...
When multiple endpoints are of interest in evidence synthesis, a multivariate meta-analysis can jointly synthesise those endpoints and utilise their correlation. A multivariate random-effects meta-analysis mus...
This paper describes the study protocol, the recruitment, and base-line data for evaluating the success of randomisation of the PRO-AGE (PRevention in Older people – Assessment in GEneralists' practices) project.
Health risk appraisal is a promising method for health promotion and prevention in older persons. The Health Risk Appraisal for the Elderly (HRA-E) developed in the U.S. has unique features but has not been te...
Reasons for attrition in studies vary, but may be a major concern in long-term studies if those who drop out differ systematically from those who continue to participate. Factors associated with dropout were e...
Missing data present a challenge to many research projects. The problem is often pronounced in studies utilizing self-report scales, and literature addressing different strategies for dealing with missing data...
It is often stated that external validity is not sufficiently considered in the assessment of clinical studies. Although tools for its evaluation have been established, there is a lack of awareness of their si...
Provision of evidence on costs alongside evidence on the effects of interventions can enhance the relevance of systematic reviews to decision-making. However, patterns of use of economics methods alongside sys...
Stepped wedge randomised trial designs involve sequential roll-out of an intervention to participants (individuals or clusters) over a number of time periods. By the end of the study, all participants will hav...
Providers use risk-adjustment systems to help manage healthcare costs. Typically, ordinary least squares (OLS) models on either untransformed or log-transformed cost are used. We examine the predictive ability...
Methods for describing one's confidence in the available evidence are useful for end-users of evidence reviews. Analysts inevitably make judgments about the quality, quantity consistency, robustness, and magni...
The study design with the smallest bias for causal inference is a perfect randomized clinical trial. Since this design is often not feasible in epidemiologic studies, an important challenge is to model bias pr...
Meta-analysis has become a well-known method for synthesis of quantitative data from previously conducted research in applied health sciences. So far, meta-analysis has been particularly useful in evaluating a...
In this paper we compare the results in an analysis of determinants of caregivers' health derived from two approaches, a structural equation model and a log-linear model, using the same data set.
The benefit-risk ratio has been proposed to measure the tradeoff between benefits and risks of two therapies for a single binary measure of efficacy and a single adverse event. The ratio is calculated from the...
The psychometric properties of the nursing home administrator job satisfaction questionnaire (NHA-JSQ) are presented, and the steps used to develop this instrument.
The interpretation of the results of active-control trials regarding the efficacy and safety of a new drug is important for drug registration and following clinical use. It has been suggested that non-inferior...
A recent paper found that terminal digits of statistical values in Nature deviated significantly from an equiprobable distribution, indicating errors or inconsistencies in rounding. This finding, as well as th...
The Levels of Evidence Rating System is widely believed to categorize studies by quality, with Level I studies representing the highest quality evidence. We aimed to determine the reporting quality of Randomis...
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...
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