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…

Machine learning (ML) algorithms have proven highly accurate for identifying Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) but are not used much in practice, in part because the best way to make use of the technology in a typical workflow is unclear. In this work, we evaluate ML models for RCT classification (support vector machines, convolutional neural…

Background: It is unclear which terms should be included in bibliographic searches for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of drugs, and identifying relevant drug terms can be extremely laborious. The aim of our analysis was to determine whether a bibliographic search using only the generic drug name produces sufficient results for the generation…

Researchers may have multiple motivations for combining disparate pieces of evidence in a meta-analysis, such as generalizing experimental results or increasing the power to detect an effect that a single study is not able to detect. However, while in meta-analysis, the main question may be simple, the structure of evidence available to answer it…