392,186 papers found

STUDY OBJECTIVES: Sleep research has grown substantially in recent decades, producing a large amount of data and an increasing number of meta-analyses. This study sought to establish the volume of meta-analyses in this area and assess how this level of material has developed over time. METHODS: A bibliographic search…

INTRODUCTION: Meta-analyses provide high-level evidence and understanding their trends may provide understanding of the field as a whole. Bibliometric analysis was undertaken to understand research trends in a particular field or subfield and to assess citation as a measure of impact. METHODS: All journals categorised…

AIMS: To investigate which type of exercise is the most effective for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia. BACKGROUND: Exercise is recommended as a promising intervention for people with cognitive impairment. However, which type of exercise is the most beneficial for people with MCI or dementia see…

OBJECTIVES: Meta-analyses of rare events often generate unstable results, and selective reporting of the results may mislead the health care decision. Developing a synthesis plan for rare events in protocol may help to formulate the reporting. We aim to investigate whether existing protocols specified methods to deal w…

Clinical guidelines for the treatment of septic shock are based on the studies with the best scientific evidence, which are meta-analyses of clinical trials. However, these meta-analyses may have methodological limitations that prevent their conclusions from being extrapolated to routine clinical practice. Therefore, t…

OBJECTIVE: The central venous catheter is used extensively worldwide. The purpose of this bibliometric analysis was to identify the 100 top-cited systematic reviews/meta-analyses in the literature on central venous catheters and to capture the most important trends in this area of research. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY: A sea…

OBJECTIVES: The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of number of studies in a meta-analysis on the detection of publication bias using P value-driven methods. METHODS: The proportion of meta-analyses detected by Egger's, Harbord's, Peters', and Begg's tests to have asymmetry suggestive of publication bias w…

INTRODUCTION: Fever is an integral part of the inflammatory response and has therefore likely a physiological role in fighting infections. Nevertheless, whether fever in itself is beneficial or harmful in adults is unknown. This protocol for a systematic review aims at identifying the beneficial and harmful effects of…

BACKGROUND: Several reviews have noted shortcomings regarding the quality and reporting of network meta-analyses (NMAs). We suspect that this issue may be partially attributable to limitations in current NMA software which do not readily produce all of the output needed to satisfy current guidelines. RESULTS: To bette…

INTRODUCTION: Pneumoconiosis is characterised by diffuse fibrosis in lung tissue, and its incidence is on the rise. At present, there are limited therapeutic options for pneumoconiosis. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) has been widely used to treat pneumoconiosis，however, there is limited evidence concerning its ef…

A systematic review and meta-analysis is an important step in evidence synthesis. The current paradigm for meta-analyses requires a presentation of the means under a random-effects model; however, a mean with a confidence interval provides an incomplete summary of the underlying heterogeneity in meta-analysis. Predicti…

Meta-analytic methods may be used to combine evidence from different sources of information. Quite commonly, the normal-normal hierarchical model (NNHM) including a random-effect to account for between-study heterogeneity is utilized for such analyses. The same modeling framework may also be used to not only derive a c…

Coordinate-based meta-analyses (CBMA) are very useful for summarizing the large number of voxel-based neuroimaging studies of normal brain functions and brain abnormalities in neuropsychiatric disorders. However, current CBMA methods do not conduct common voxelwise tests, but rather a test of convergence, which relies…

AIM: We investigated the association of WNT inhibitory factor-1 (WIF-1) gene methylation with the pathogenesis of multiple human tumors, using a meta-analysis based approach. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Electronic databases and manual search was additionally employed to retrieve relevant published literature. The cohort st…

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Investigations on the relationship between angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) insertion/deletion (I/D) gene polymorphism and prostate cancer risk are conflicting. This meta-analysis was conducted to assess the relationship between ACE I/D gene polymorphism and prostate cancer risk. MATERIALS…

BACKGROUND: To investigate the use of physical activity monitors (PAMs) for the elderly, the scientific literature should be systematically reviewed and the effect quantified, as the evidence seems inconclusive. METHODS AND DESIGN: Randomized controlled trials and randomized crossover trials, with participants with a…

Neuroimaging has evolved into a widely used method to investigate the functional neuroanatomy, brain-behaviour relationships, and pathophysiology of brain disorders, yielding a literature of more than 30,000 papers. With such an explosion of data, it is increasingly difficult to sift through the literature and distingu…

Dependent effect sizes are ubiquitous in meta-analysis. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we compared the performance of 2 methods for meta-regression with dependent effect sizes-robust variance estimation (RVE) and 3-level modeling-with the standard meta-analytic method for independent effect sizes. We further compared bi…

Meta-analysis is the gold standard for synthesis in ecology and evolution. Together with estimating overall effect magnitudes, meta-analyses estimate differences between effect sizes via heterogeneity statistics. It is widely hypothesized that heterogeneity will be present in ecological/evolutionary meta-analyses due t…

BACKGROUND: Industry commissions contracting companies to perform network meta-analysis for health technology assessment (HTA) and reimbursement submissions. Our objective was to estimate the number of network meta-analyses performed by consulting companies contracted by industry, to assess whether they were published,…