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In 1999 a four-level hierarchy of evidence was promoted by the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia. The primary purpose of this hierarchy was to assist with clinical practice guideline de...
The evaluation of academic research performance is nowadays a priority issue. Bibliometric indicators such as the number of publications, total citation counts and h-index are an indispensable tool in this tas...
It is often desirable to observe how a disease progresses over time in individual patients, rather than graphing group averages; and since multiple outcomes are typically recorded on each patient, it would be ...
Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) allow systematic assessment of preferences by asking respondents to choose between scenarios. We conducted a labelled discrete choice experiment with realistic choices to inv...
The problem of silent multiple comparisons is one of the most difficult statistical problems faced by scientists. It is a particular problem for investigating a one-off cancer cluster reported to a health depa...
Systematic review and meta-analysis currently underpin much of evidence-based medicine. Such methodologies bring order to previous research, but future research planning remains relatively incoherent and ineffici...
Health-related quality of life is a topic of current interest. This paper considers a randomized phase III study of radiation therapy with concurrent chemotherapy (docetaxel) versus radiation therapy alone in ...
Physical activity is being studied as a breast cancer prevention strategy. Women at risk of breast cancer report interest in lifestyle modification, but recruitment to randomized physical activity intervention...
Analysis of biomedical research and publications in a country or group of countries is used to monitor research progress and trends. This study aims to assess the performance of biomedical research in the Arab...
Many recently published clinical studies report sex-specific data. This information may help to improve clinical decision-making for both sexes, but it is not easily accessible in MEDLINE. The aim of this proj...
Stents are commonly used to treat patients with coronary artery disease. However, the quality of reporting internal and external validity data in published reports of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of ste...
Data from scientific literature show that about 63% of abstracts presented at biomedical conferences will be published in full. Some studies have indicated that full publication is associated with the directio...
In clinical practice a diagnosis is based on a combination of clinical history, physical examination and additional diagnostic tests. At present, studies on diagnostic research often report the accuracy of tes...
The number needed to treat (NNT) is a well-known effect measure for reporting the results of clinical trials. In the case of time-to-event outcomes, the calculation of NNTs is more difficult than in the case o...
Latinos comprise the largest racial/ethnic group in the United States and have 2–3 times the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus as Caucasians.
Understanding participation in a prospective study is crucial to maintaining and improving retention rates. In 1990–92, following attempted blood donation at five blood centers, we enrolled 155 HTLV-I, 387 HTL...
Although eponyms are widely used in medicine, they arbitrarily alternate between the possessive and nonpossessive forms. As very little is known regarding extent and distribution of this variation, the present...
Parental rearing behavior is a significant etiological factor for the vulnerability of psychopathology and has been an issue of clinical research for a long time. For this scope instruments are important who a...
Systematic reviews have developed into a powerful method for summarising and synthesising evidence. The rise in systematic reviews creates a methodological opportunity and associated challenges and this is see...
The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate the methodology of online focus group discussions within the setting of paediatric oncology.
The feasibility of randomized trials often depends on successful patient recruitment. Although numerous recruitment barriers have been identified it is unclear which of them complicate recruitment most. Also, ...
In this study we explored the challenges to establishing a community of practice (CoP) to address standards in general practice. We focused on the issue of improving referral letters which are the main form of...
In neonatal trials of pre-term or low-birth-weight infants, twins may represent 10–20% of the study sample. Mixed-effects models and generalized estimating equations are common approaches for handling correlat...
Laser-Doppler imaging (LDI) of cutaneous blood flow is beginning to be used by burn surgeons to predict the healing time of burn wounds; predicted healing time is used to determine wound treatment as either dr...
The problem of missing studies in meta-analysis has received much attention. Less attention has been paid to the more serious problem of double counting of evidence.
Multivariate analysis of interval censored event data based on classical likelihood methods is notoriously cumbersome. Likelihood inference for models which additionally include random effects are not availabl...
Extraneous distractions may influence the flow of general practice consultations. This study piloted a methodology to examine the impact of interrupting general practitioners (GPs) while consulting actor-patie...
Attributable fractions (AF) assess the proportion of cases in a population attributable to certain risk factors but are infrequently reported and mostly calculated without considering potential confounders. Wh...
Assessing agreement in method comparison studies depends on two fundamentally important components; validity (the between method agreement) and reproducibility (the within method agreement). The Bland-Altman l...
Kappa is commonly used when assessing the agreement of conditions with reference standard, but has been criticized for being highly dependent on the prevalence. To overcome this limitation, a prevalence-adjust...
To compare the diagnostic accuracy of two continuous screening tests, a common approach is to test the difference between the areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. After study partici...
Quality assessment tools for primary studies of test accuracy are relatively well developed, although only one is validated (QUADAS), but very little work has been done to develop tools to quality-assess studi...
In meta-analysis, the presence of funnel plot asymmetry is attributed to publication or other small-study effects, which causes larger effects to be observed in the smaller studies. This issue potentially mean...
It can be challenging for patients and clinicians to properly interpret a change in the clinical condition after a treatment has been given. It is not known to which extent spontaneous improvement, effect of p...
Many epidemiologic studies report the odds ratio as a measure of association for cross-sectional studies with common outcomes. In such cases, the prevalence ratios may not be inferred from the estimated odds r...
The heterogeneity statistic I 2, interpreted as the percentage of variability due to heterogeneity between studies rather than sampling error, depends on precision, that is, the size of the studies included.
The practice of dichotomizing a continuous outcome variable does not make use of within-category information. That means the loss of information. This study compared two approaches in the modelling of the asso...
The National Database for Nursing Quality Indicators® (NDNQI®) was established in 1998 to assist hospitals in monitoring indicators of nursing quality (eg, falls and pressure ulcers). Hospitals participating in N...
Additional insights into patient preferences can be gained by supplementing discrete choice experiments with best-worst choice tasks. However, there are no empirical studies illustrating the relative advantage...
A common feature of diagnostic research is that results for a diagnostic gold standard are available primarily for patients who are positive for the test under investigation. Data from such studies are subject...
There is little information on the validity of using record linkage with routinely collected data for case ascertainment of stroke in large population-based studies in the UK. We examined the accuracy of these...
Primary health care clinicians are being encouraged to undertake qualitative research, however the in-depth interviewing skills required are not as straightforward as might be first supposed. While there are b...
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an important cause of acquired disability. In evaluating the effectiveness of clinical interventions for TBI it is important to measure disability accurately. The Glasgow Outcom...
Epidemiological and other studies that require participants to respond by completing a questionnaire face the growing threat of non-response. Response rates to household telephone surveys are diminishing becau...
The objective of most biomedical research is to determine an unbiased estimate of effect for an exposure on an outcome, i.e. to make causal inferences about the exposure. Recent developments in epidemiology ha...
In population studies, body mass index (BMI) is generally calculated from self-reported body weight and height. The self-report of these anthropometrics is known to be biased, resulting in a misclassification ...
Principal component analysis (PCA) and partial least square (PLS) regression may be useful to summarize the HIV genotypic information. Without pre-selection each mutation presented in at least one patient is c...
Edwards's method is a widely used approach for fitting a sine curve to a time-series of monthly frequencies. From this fitted curve, estimates of the seasonal intensity of occurrence (i.e., peak-to-low ratio o...
Database systems have been developed to store data from large medical trials and survey studies. However, a reliable data storage system does not guarantee data entering reliability.
The incidence of Type 2 diabetes is increasing worldwide and diabetes is four times more common among ethnic minority groups than among the general Caucasian population. This study reflects on the specific iss...
Citation Impact 2023
Journal Impact Factor: 3.9
5-year Journal Impact Factor: 6.5
Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 1.701
SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 1.632
Speed 2023
Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 18
Submission to acceptance (median days): 210
Usage 2023
Downloads: 4,638,094
Altmetric mentions: 3,126
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