Well-conducted systematic reviews can provide a foundation upon which to base educational curricula, practice guidelines and healthcare policy. We aim to provide an overview of important methodological issues that need to be addressed during the five phases of performing a systematic review. 1. The specific problems to be addressed by the systematic review need to be formulated as clear, unambi...

Background: A non-inferiority (NI) trial is intended to show that the effect of a new treatment is not worse than the comparator. We conducted a review to identify how NI trials were conducted and reported, and whether the standard requirements from the guidelines were followed. Methodology and Principal Findings: From 300 randomly selected articles on NI trials registered in PubMed at 5 Februa...

Acquiring knowledge about the underlying structures of the environment presents a number of challenges for a naive learner. These challenges include the absence of reinforcement to guide learning, the presence of numerous information sources from which only a select few are relevant, and the uncertainty about when an underlying structure may have undergone a change. A crucial implication of the...