Objective To evaluate the impact of searching clinical trial registries in systematic reviews.Design Methodological systematic review and reanalyses of meta-analyses.Data sources Medline was searched to identify systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) assessing pharmaceutical treatments published between June 2014 and January 2015. For all systematic reviews that did not repor...

A systematic review is a transparent and unbiased review of available information. The published systematic review must report the details of the conduct of the review as one might report the details of a primary research project. A meta-analysis is a powerful and rigorous statistical approach to synthesize data from multiple studies, preferably obtained from a systematic review, in order to en...

A systematic review aims to synthesize all available individual studies on a certain topic and uses explicit and reproducible methods for searching the literature, while a meta-analysis is a mathematical synthesis of the results of these individual studies. Because of the explosion of information in the scientific literature, these study designs can be useful tools to summarize the knowledge on...

Meta-analyses and systematic reviews provide ways of synthesizing literature to clarify issues on which there is controversy or to confirm generally held views. They are used increasingly in orthopaedic surgery and other fields: a PubMed search of orthopaedic meta-analyses using ‘‘(orthopaedic[ad] OR orthopedic[ad]) AND meta-analysis[ti]’’ yielded 145 articles, 104 of which were published since...

Systematic reviews answer clinical questions by finding and evaluating all available evidence. The systematic review is a powerful tool to help clinicians use evidence for patient care decisions. There are many sources for high-quality systematic reviews. Like all scientific studies there are potential biases, but systematic reviews have many benefits over narrative reviews. To ensure appropria...

OBJECTIVES This article presents a new tool that helps systematic reviewers to extract and compare implementation data across primary trials. Currently, systematic review guidance does not provide guidelines for the identification and extraction of data related to the implementation of the underlying interventions. STUDY DESIGN AND SETTING A team of systematic reviewers used a multistaged con...

Systematic reviews of diagnostic accuracy studies allow calculation of pooled estimates of accuracy with increased precision and examination of differences in accuracy between tests or subgroups of studies. Recently, several advances have been made in the methods used in performing systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy studies, most notably in how to assess the methodological quality o...

INTRODUCTION Meta-analyses of clinical trials often provide sufficient information for decision-makers to evaluate whether chance can explain apparent differences between interventions. Interpretation of the magnitude and importance of treatment effects beyond statistical significance can, however, be challenging, particularly for patient-reported outcomes (PROs) measured using questionnaires w...

This study provides a synthesis of meta-analyses and systematic reviews on non-pharmacological treatments for childhood aggression. Treatments referred to universal prevention, selective prevention, indicated prevention, or intervention (Mrazek and Haggerty, 1994). Seventy-two meta-analyses and systematic reviews met the inclusion criteria. We describe their characteristics, effect sizes across...