Extracting data from studies is the norm in meta-analyses, enabling researchers to generate effect sizes when raw data are otherwise not available. While there has been a general push for increased reproducibility in meta-analysis, the transparency and reproducibility of the data extraction phase is still lagging behind. Unfortunately, there is…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) is an established method for assessing the comparative efficacy and safety of competing interventions. It is often the case that we deal with interventions that consist of multiple, possibly interacting, components. Examples of interventions' components include characteristics of the intervention, mode (face-to-face,…

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…

Meta-analysis of proportions is conceptually simple: Faced with a binary outcome in multiple studies, we seek inference on some overall proportion of successes/failures. Under common effect models, exact inference has long been available, but is not when we more realistically allow for heterogeneity of the proportions. Instead a wide range of…

Objective: This paper describes several automation tools and software that can be considered during evidence synthesis projects and provides guidance for their integration in the conduct of scoping reviews. Study Design and Setting: The guidance presented in this work is adapted from the results of a scoping review and consultations with the JBI…

Introduction: Interrupted Time Series (ITS) studies may be used to assess the impact of an interruption, such as an intervention or exposure. The data from such studies are particularly amenable to visual display and, when clearly depicted, can readily show the short- and long-term impact of an interruption. Further, well-constructed graphs allow…

Despite a major increase in the range and number of software offerings now available to help researchers produce evidence syntheses, there is currently no generic tool for producing figures to display and explore the risk-of-bias assessments that routinely take place as part of systematic review. However, tools such as the R programming…

Systematic reviews are vital instruments for researchers to understand broad trends in a field and synthesize evidence on the effectiveness of interventions in addressing specific issues. The quality of a systematic review depends critically on having comprehensively surveyed all relevant literature on the review topic. In addition to database…

A systematic review is a type of literature review that aims to collect and analyse all available evidence from the literature on a particular topic. The process of screening and identifying eligible articles from the vast amounts of literature is a time-consuming task. Specialised software has been developed to aid in the screening process and…

When searching for scholarly documents, researchers often stick with the same familiar handful of databases. Yet, just beyond these limited horizons lie dozens of alternatives with which they could search more effectively, whether for quick lookups or thorough searches in systematic reviews or meta-analyses. Searchsmart.org is a free website that…

The Systematic Review Toolbox aims provide a web-based catalogue of tools that support various tasks within the systematic review and wider evidence synthesis process. Identifying publications surrounding specific systematic review tools is currently challenging, leading to a high screening burden for few eligible records. We aimed to develop a…

Systematic searching aims to find all possibly relevant research from multiple sources, the basis for an unbiased and comprehensive evidence base. Along with bibliographic databases, systematic reviewers use a variety of additional methods to minimise procedural bias. Citation chasing exploits connections between research articles to identify…

The field of evidence synthesis is growing rapidly, with a corresponding increase in the number of software tools and workflows to support the construction of systematic reviews, systematic maps, and meta-analyses. Despite much progress, however, a number of problems remain, including slow integration of new statistical or methodological…

There are several user-written programs for performing meta-analysis in Stata (Stata Statistical Software: College Station, TX: Stata Corp LP). These include metan, metareg, mvmeta, and glst. However, there are several cases for which these programs do not suffice. For instance, there is no software for performing univariate meta-analysis with…

The wide variety of readily available electronic media grants anyone the freedom to retrieve published references from almost any area of research around the world. Despite this privilege, keeping up with primary research evidence is almost impossible because of the increase in professional publishing across disciplines. Systematic reviews are a…