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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...
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...
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)
2023 Speed
40 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
210 days submission to accept (Median)
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The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency: Single anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
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