The realist review/synthesis has become an increasingly prominent methodological approach to evidence synthesis that can inform policy and practice. While there are publication standards and guidelines for the conduct of realist reviews, published reviews often provide minimal detail regarding how they have conducted some methodological steps.…

A diversity of approaches for critically appraising qualitative and quantitative evidence exist and emphasize different aspects. These approaches lack clear processes to facilitate rating the overall quality of the evidence for aggregated findings that combine qualitative and quantitative evidence. We draw on a meta-aggregation of implementation…

Predatory journals are a blemish on scholarly publishing and academia and the studies published within them are more likely to contain data that is false. The inclusion of studies from predatory journals in evidence syntheses is potentially problematic due to this propensity for false data to be included. To date, there has been little exploration…

Meta-analyses have become the gold standard for synthesizing evidence from multiple clinical trials, and they are especially useful when outcomes are rare or adverse since individual trials often lack sufficient power to detect a treatment effect. However, when zero events are observed in one or both treatment arms in a trial, commonly used…

Background The CLUSTER model of searching was proposed as a systematic method of searching for studies for reviews of complex interventions. Aim: The method has not been evaluated before. This methodological review identified and evaluated a sample of evidence syntheses that have used CLUSTER. Methods: A forward citation search on the seed CLUSTER…

Rapid reviews have been widely employed to support timely decision-making, and limiting the search date is the most popular approach in published rapid reviews. We assessed the accuracy and workload of search date limits on the meta-analytical results to determine the best rapid strategy. The meta-analyses data were collected from the Cochrane…

Data extraction is a crucial, yet labor-intensive and error-prone part of evidence synthesis. To date, efforts to harness machine learning for enhancing efficiency of the data extraction process have fallen short of achieving sufficient accuracy and usability. With the release of large language models (LLMs), new possibilities have emerged to…

Introduction: The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) reviews rigorous research on educational interventions with a goal of identifying "what works" and making that information accessible to educators and policymakers. In rating the quality of causal research, the WWC has historically prioritized internal validity over external validity. One…

Background: COVID-19 accentuated an evergreen dilemma in evidence-informed policy making--the imperative to synthesise the best available evidence with limited time to produce high quality synthesis. The pandemic prompted the adaptation of evidence synthesis practices to match the urgency of the crisis, and heightened demand by policy makers,…

In Bayesian random-effects meta-analysis, the use of weakly informative prior distributions is of particular benefit in cases where only a few studies are included, a situation often encountered in health technology assessment (HTA). Suggestions for empirical prior distributions are available in the literature but it is unknown whether these are…

Risk of bias (RoB) assessments are a core element of evidence synthesis but can be time consuming and subjective. We aimed to develop a decision rule-based algorithm for RoB assessment of seroprevalence studies. We developed the SeroTracker-RoB algorithm. The algorithm derives seven objective and two subjective critical appraisal items from the…

Synthesizers of evidence are increasingly likely to encounter studies published in predatory journals during the evidence synthesis process. The evidence synthesis discipline is uniquely positioned to encounter novel concerns associated with predatory journals. The objective of this research was to explore the attitudes, opinions, and experiences…

In evidence synthesis, dealing with zero-events studies is an important and complicated task that has generated broad discussion. Numerous methods provide valid solutions to synthesizing data from studies with zero-events, either based on a frequentist or a Bayesian framework. Among frequentist frameworks, the one-stage methods have their unique…

In evidence-based practice, new topics generally only have a few studies available for synthesis. As a result, the evidence of such meta-analyses raised substantial concerns. We investigated the robustness of the evidence from these earliest studies. Real-world data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) were collected. We…

This article provides background information about evidence synthesis, the process of collecting, evaluating, and summarizing results from multiple studies that have investigated the same research question. The article also examines the critical role of librarians in conducting evidence synthesis, and examines the accelerating uptake of systematic…