Systematic reviews often encounter primary studies that report multiple effect sizes based on data from the same participants. These have the potential to introduce statistical dependency into the meta-analytic data set. In this paper, we provide a tutorial on dealing with effect size multiplicity within studies in the context of meta-analyses of…

Network meta-analysis compares multiple treatments in terms of their efficacy and harm by including evidence from randomized controlled trials. Most clinical trials use parallel design, where patients are randomly allocated to different treatments and receive only 1 treatment. However, some trials use within person designs such as split-body,…

Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis is an increasingly used approach for synthesizing and investigating treatment effect estimates. Over the past few years, numerous methods for conducting an IPD meta-analysis (IPD-MA) have been proposed, often making different assumptions and modeling choices while addressing a similar research…

Visual display of reported impacts is a valuable aid to both reviewers and readers of systematic reviews. Forest plots are routinely prepared to report standardised effect sizes, but where standardised effect sizes are not available for all included studies a forest plot may misrepresent the available evidence. Tabulated data summaries to…

We describe our experience of using a modified version of the Cochrane risk of bias (RoB) tool for randomised and non-randomised comparative studies. Objectives: (1) To assess time to complete RoB assessment; (2) To assess inter-rater agreement; and (3) To explore the association between RoB and treatment effect size. Methods: Cochrane risk of…