This study aimed to assess the methods and outcomes of The Measurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) 2 appraisals in overviews of reviews (overviews) of interventions in the cardiovascular field and identify factors that are associated with these outcomes. MEDLINE, Scopus, and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews were searched…

The application of network meta-analysis is becoming increasingly widespread, and for a successful implementation, it requires that the direct comparison result and the indirect comparison result should be consistent. Because of this, a proper detection of inconsistency is often a key issue in network meta-analysis as whether the results can be…

The "LFK" index has been promoted as an improved method to detect bias in meta-analysis. Putatively, its performance does not depend on the number of studies in the meta-analysis. We conducted a simulation study, comparing the "LFK" index test to three standard tests for funnel plot asymmetry in settings with smaller or larger…

Meta-analyses examining dichotomous outcomes often include single-zero studies, where no events occur in intervention or control groups. These pose challenges, and several methods have been proposed to address them. A fixed continuity correction method has been shown to bias estimates, but it is frequently used because sometimes software (e.g.,…

In Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis, the use of weakly informative prior distributions is of particular benefit in cases where only a few studies are included, a situation often encountered in health technology assessment (HTA). Suggestions for empirical prior distributions are available in the literature but it is unknown whether these are…

Increasing concerns about the trustworthiness of research have prompted calls to scrutinise studies' Individual Participant Data (IPD), but guidance on how to do this was lacking. To address this, we developed the IPD Integrity Tool to screen randomised controlled trials (RCTs) for integrity issues. Development of the tool involved a literature…

The product Bayes factor (PBF) synthesizes evidence for an informative hypothesis across heterogeneous replication studies. It can be used when fixed- or random effects meta-analysis fall short. For example, when effect sizes are incomparable and cannot be pooled, or when studies diverge significantly in the populations, study designs, and…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) incorporates all available evidence into a general statistical framework for comparing multiple treatments. Standard NMAs make three major assumptions, namely homogeneity, similarity, and consistency, and violating these assumptions threatens an NMA's validity. In this article, we suggest a graphical approach to…

Systematic reviews (SRs) have an important role in the healthcare decision-making practice. Assessing the overall confidence in the results of SRs using quality assessment tools, such as "A MeaSurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2" (AMSTAR 2), is crucial since not all SRs are conducted using the most rigorous methods. In this…

RobotReviewer is a tool for automatically assessing the risk of bias in randomized controlled trials, but there is limited evidence of its reliability. We evaluated the agreement between RobotReviewer and humans regarding the risk of bias assessment based on 1955 randomized controlled trials. The risk of bias in these trials was assessed via two…

Several AI-aided screening tools have emerged to tackle the ever-expanding body of literature. These tools employ active learning, where algorithms sort abstracts based on human feedback. However, researchers using these tools face a crucial dilemma: When should they stop screening without knowing the proportion of relevant studies? Although…

Conducting high-quality overviews of reviews (OoR) is time-consuming. Because the quality of systematic reviews (SRs) varies, it is necessary to critically appraise SRs when conducting an OoR. A well-established appraisal tool is A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) 2, which takes about 15-32 min per application. To save time,…

Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis projects obtain, harmonise, and synthesise original data from multiple studies. Many IPD meta-analyses of randomised trials are initiated to identify treatment effect modifiers at the individual level, thus requiring statistical modelling of interactions between treatment effect and participant-level…

Literature screening is the process of identifying all relevant records from a pool of candidate paper records in systematic review, meta-analysis, and other research synthesis tasks. This process is time consuming, expensive, and prone to human error. Screening prioritization methods attempt to help reviewers identify most relevant records while…

In health technology assessment, matching-adjusted indirect comparison (MAIC) is the most common method for pairwise comparisons that control for imbalances in baseline characteristics across trials. One of the primary challenges in MAIC is the need to properly account for the additional uncertainty introduced by the matching process. Limited…