Introduction: During systematic reviews, data abstraction is labor- and time-intensive and error-prone. Existing data abstraction systems do not track specific locations and contexts of abstracted information. To address this limitation, we developed a software application, the Data Abstraction Assistant (DAA) and surveyed early users about their…

Meta-analysis offers ecologists a powerful tool for knowledge synthesis. Albeit a form of review, it also shares many similarities with primary empirical research. Consequently, critical reading of meta-analyses incorporates criteria from both sets of approaches particularly because ecology is a discipline that embraces heterogeneity and broad…

When examining the evidence on therapeutic interventions to answer a comparative effectiveness research question, one should consider all studies that are informative on the interventions' causal effects. "Single group studies" evaluate outcomes longitudinally in cohorts of subjects who are managed with a single treatment strategy.…

We performed a survey of meta-analyses of test performance to describe the evolution in their methods and reporting. Studies were identified through MEDLINE (1966-2009), reference lists, and relevant reviews. We extracted information on clinical topics, literature review methods, quality assessment, and statistical analyses. We reviewed 760…

The objective of this study is to empirically compare alternative meta-analytic methods for combining dose-response data from epidemiological studies. We identified meta-analyses of epidemiological studies that analyzed the association between a single nutrient and a dichotomous outcome. For each topic, we performed meta-analyses of odds ratios…