This scoping review aims to identify and systematically review published mapping reviews to assess their commonality and heterogeneity and determine whether additional efforts should be made to standardise methodology and reporting. The following databases were searched; Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Campbell collaboration database,…

Rapid review methodology aims to facilitate faster conduct of systematic reviews to meet the needs of the decision-maker, while also maintaining quality and credibility. This systematic review aimed to determine the impact of different methodological shortcuts for undertaking rapid reviews on the risk of bias (RoB) of the results of the review.…

Cochrane reviews are known to be a high-quality source of evidence synthesis supporting health care decisions. In a recently conducted study, we analyzed the trends in epidemiology and reporting of published systematic reviews over the last 20 years. This sample of 1132 systematic reviews included 84 Cochrane reviews. We have learned several…

A substantial proportion of trial registrations are not linked to corresponding published articles, limiting analyses and new tools. Our aim was to develop a method for finding articles reporting the results of trials that are registered on ClinicalTrials.gov when they do not include metadata links. We used a set of 27,280 trial registration and…

Background: The search for studies for a systematic review should be conducted systematically and reported transparently to facilitate reproduction. This study aimed to report on the conduct and reporting of backward citation searching (ie, checking reference lists) and forward citation searching in a cross section of Cochrane reviews. Citation…

Background: It is important that systematic reviews (SRs) are up-to-date, otherwise they cannot be relied upon to guide decision-making in practice and policy. Our aim was to investigate epidemiological, descriptive and reporting characteristics of a cross-section of recently published updates of SRs. Methods: A SR update was defined as a new…

Introduction: Registration of clinical trials has been initiated in order to assess adherence of the reported results to the original trial protocol. This study aimed to investigate the publication rates, timely dissemination of results, and the prevalence of consistency in hypothesis, sample size, and primary endpoint of Dutch…

Background: Forwards citation searching is a valuable method for finding relevant studies in reviews where concepts are not clearly defined. Scopus and Web of Science can both be used for forwards citation searching but there is little evidence comparing the resources for this purpose. Method: 104 source records relevant to a scoping review of…

One of the reasons for the popularity of meta-analysis is the notion that these analyses will possess more power to detect effects than individual studies. This is inevitably the case under a fixed-effect model. However, the inclusion of the between-study variance in the random-effects model, and the need to estimate this parameter, can have…

Introduction: Registration and publication of trial protocols has become increasingly important and a requirement in some sources of funding and publication. Increased access to protocols yields many potential benefits, but there are issues regarding identification of published protocols. The aim of this investigation is to compare methods of…

Background: It has been reported that information sources searched in systematic reviews (SRs) are insufficiently comprehensive. We analyzed information sources used in SRs, as well as how up-to-date were the searches. Methods: We searched PubMed and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) through Wiley from 2012 to 2016 to find SRs of…

Authors and indexers are increasingly including terms for adverse "drug" effects in the titles, abstracts, or indexing of records in MEDLINE and Embase. However, it is not clear if this is the same for studies with "nondrug" adverse effects data. We therefore assessed the feasibility of using adverse effects terms when…

Objective: Identify the most performant automated text classification method (eg, algorithm) for differentiating empirical studies from nonempirical works in order to facilitate systematic mixed studies reviews. Methods: The algorithms were trained and validated with 8050 database records, which had previously been manually categorized as…

Introduction: Systematic review methods are now being used for reviews of food production, food safety and security, plant health, and animal health and welfare. Information retrieval methods in this context have been informed by human health-care approaches and ideally should be based on relevant research and experience. Objective: This narrative…

Introduction: Previous studies suggest that many systematic reviews contain meta-analyses that display temporal trends, such as the first study's result being more extreme than later studies' or a drift in the pooled estimate. We assessed the extent and characteristics of temporal trends using all Cochrane intervention reports published 2008-2012.…