Despite research investment and a growing body of diverse evidence there has been no comprehensive review and grading of evidence for public health emergency preparedness and response practices comparable to those in medicine and other public health fields. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened an ad hoc committee…

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…

Evidence syntheses that engage librarians as co-authors produce higher-quality results than those that do not. Trained as teachers, researchers, and information managers, librarians possess expert knowledge on research methodologies and information retrieval approaches that are critical for evidence synthesis. Researchers are under increasing…

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…

Some patients benefit from a treatment while others may do so less or do not benefit at all. We have previously developed a two-stage network meta-regression prediction model that synthesized randomized trials and evaluates how treatment effects vary across patient characteristics. In this article, we extended this model to combine different…

Meta-analysis is a widely used methodology to combine evidence from different sources examining a common research phenomenon, to obtain a quantitative summary of the studied phenomenon. In the medical field, multiple studies investigate the effectiveness of new treatments and meta-analysis is largely performed to generate the summary (average)…

Contextual factors such as cultural values and traditions impact on implementation processes of healthcare interventions. It is one of the reasons why local stakeholders may decide to role out a programme differently from how it has originally been developed or described in scientific literature. This can result in different but most likely more…

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…

Mathematical modeling studies are increasingly recognised as an important tool for evidence synthesis and to inform clinical and public health decision-making, particularly when data from systematic reviews of primary studies do not adequately answer a research question. However, systematic reviewers and guideline developers may struggle with…

In systematic reviews, meta-analyses are routinely applied to summarize the results of the relevant studies for a specific research question. If one can assume that in all studies the same true effect is estimated, the application of a meta-analysis with common effect (commonly referred to as fixed-effect meta-analysis) is adequate. If…

Network meta-analysis has been gaining prominence as an evidence synthesis method that enables the comprehensive synthesis and simultaneous comparison of multiple treatments. In many network meta-analyses, some of the constituent studies may have markedly different characteristics from the others, and may be influential enough to change the…

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…

A network meta-analysis allows a simultaneous comparison between treatments evaluated in randomised controlled trials that share at least one treatment with at least one other study. Estimates of treatment effects may be required for treatments across disconnected networks of evidence, which requires a different statistical approach and modelling…

In studies with time-to-event data, outcomes may be reported as hazard ratios (HR) or binomial counts/proportions at a specific time point. If the intent is to synthesise evidence by performing a meta-analysis or network meta-analysis (NMA) using the HR as the measure of treatment effect, studies that only report binomial data cannot be included…