Abstract:
BACKGROUND:Evidence syntheses, and in particular systematic reviews (SRs), have become one of the cornerstones of evidence-based health care. The Assessment of Multiple Systematic Reviews (AMSTAR) tool has become the most widely used tool for investigating the methodological quality of SRs and is currently undergoing revision. The objective of this paper is to present insights, challenges and potential solutions from the point of view of a group of assessors, while referring to earlier methodological discussions and debates with respect to AMSTAR. DISCUSSION:One major drawback of AMSTAR is that it relies heavily on reporting quality rather than on methodological quality. This can be found in several items. Furthermore, it should be acknowledged that there are now new methods and procedures that did not exist when AMSTAR was developed. For example, the note to item 1 should now refer to the International Prospective Register of Ongoing Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO). Furthermore, item 3 should consider the definition of hand-searching, as the process of reviewing conference proceedings using the search function (e.g. in Microsoft Word or in a PDF file) does not meet the definition set out by the Cochrane Collaboration. Moreover, methods for assessing the quality of the body of evidence have evolved since AMSTAR was developed and should be incorporated into a revised AMSTAR tool. Potential solutions are presented for each AMSTAR item with the aim of allowing a more thorough assessment of SRs. As the AMSTAR tool is currently undergoing further development, our paper hopes to add to preceding discussions and papers regarding this tool and stimulate further discussion.
journal_name
BMC Med Res Methodoljournal_title
BMC medical research methodologyauthors
Wegewitz U,Weikert B,Fishta A,Jacobs A,Pieper Ddoi
10.1186/s12874-016-0183-6subject
Has Abstractpub_date
2016-08-26 00:00:00pages
111issue
1issn
1471-2288pii
10.1186/s12874-016-0183-6journal_volume
16pub_type
杂志文章abstract:BACKGROUND:In order to accurately measure and monitor levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) in older adults, cost efficient and valid instruments are required. To date, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) has not been validated with older adults (aged ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,多中心研究
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0642-3
更新日期:2018-12-22 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Estimating the incidence of medical conditions using claims data often requires constructing a prevalence period that predates an event of interest, for instance the diagnosis of cancer, to exclude those with pre-existing conditions from the incidence risk set. Those conditions missed during the prevalence p...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-13-32
更新日期:2013-03-06 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Exposure to unhealthy environments and inadequate child stimulation are main risk factors that affect children's health and wellbeing in low- and middle-income countries. Interventions that simultaneously address several risk factors at the household level have great potential to reduce these negative effect...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-00950-y
更新日期:2020-04-02 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Studies in both paediatric and psychiatric settings often experience problems in recruitment. This can compromise the ability of the study to recruit to target, meaning studies are potentially underpowered. It can also result in a biased sample if a non-representative group are selectively recruited. Recruit...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0730-z
更新日期:2019-04-27 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:In recent months, multiple efforts have sought to characterize COVID-19 social distancing policy responses. These efforts have used various coding frameworks, but many have relied on coding methodologies that may not adequately describe the gradient in social distancing policies as states "re-open." METHODS...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-020-01174-w
更新日期:2020-12-08 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:There are detailed reviews about different recruitment strategies, but not with regard to differences between recruitment of hospital-based versus office-based physicians. Within this study, the two different recruitment schemes are compared. Advantages and disadvantages of different ways of recruitment in r...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0425-2
更新日期:2017-11-22 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Patient-reported outcomes (PRO) are important as endpoints in clinical trials and epidemiological studies. Guidelines for the development of PRO instruments and analysis of PRO data have emphasized the need to report methods used for sample size planning. The Raschpower procedure has been proposed for sample...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0011-4
更新日期:2015-03-15 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Primary care databases are a major source of data for epidemiological and health services research. However, most studies are based on coded information, ignoring information stored in free text. Using the early presentation of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as an exemplar, our objective was to estimate the exten...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-13-105
更新日期:2013-08-21 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Biomarkers of exposures such as infection or environmental chemicals can be measured in small volumes of blood extracted from newborn dried blood spots (DBS) underscoring their potential utility for population-based research. However, few studies have evaluated the feasibility and utility of this resource; p...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0120-8
更新日期:2016-02-04 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is a network of health-related telephone surveys--conducted by all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and participating US territories-that receive technical assistance from CDC. Data users often aggregate BRFSS state samples for national estimates wit...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0255-7
更新日期:2016-11-15 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:In many studies the information of patients who are dying in the hospital is censored when examining the change in length of hospital stay (cLOS) due to hospital-acquired infections (HIs). While appropriate estimators of cLOS are available in literature, the existence of the bias due to censoring of deaths w...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0500-3
更新日期:2018-05-30 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Evidence suggests that differences exist in physical activity (PA) participation among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) children and adolescents. It is possible that these differences could be influenced by variations in measurement technique and instrument reliability. However, culturally sensit...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-122
更新日期:2011-08-25 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures play a key role in the advancement of patient-centered care research. The accuracy of inferences, relevance of predictions, and the true nature of the associations made with PRO data depend on the validity of these measures. Errors inherent to self-report measures can ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0161-z
更新日期:2016-05-26 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between mortality and statin adherence using two different approaches to adherence measurement (summary versus repeated-measures). METHODS:A retrospective cohort study was conducted using administrative data from Saskatchewan, Canada between 1994 and 200...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-017-0339-z
更新日期:2017-04-20 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:One of the biggest challenges for population health studies is the recruitment of participants. Questions that investigators have asked are "who volunteers for studies?" and "does recruitment method influence characteristics of the samples?" The purpose of this paper was to compare sample characteristics of ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-13-149
更新日期:2013-12-06 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:To provide empirical evidence about prevalence, reporting and handling of missing outcome data in systematic reviews with network meta-analysis and acknowledgement of their impact on the conclusions. METHODS:We conducted a systematic survey including all published systematic reviews of randomized controlled...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-018-0576-9
更新日期:2018-10-24 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:This paper focuses on measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of two diagramming methods employed in key informant interviews with clinicians and health care administrators. The two methods are 'participatory diagramming', where the respondent creates a diagram that assists in their communication of answe...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-8-53
更新日期:2008-08-08 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Outcomes collected in randomized clinical trials are observations of random variables that should be independent and identically distributed. However, in some trials, the patients are randomized more than once thus violating both of these assumptions. The probability of an event is not always the same when a...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-5-17
更新日期:2005-05-10 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:We developed and validated an automated database case definition for diabetes in children and youth to facilitate pharmacoepidemiologic investigations of medications and the risk of diabetes. METHODS:The present study was part of an in-progress retrospective cohort study of antipsychotics and diabetes in Te...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-12-128
更新日期:2012-08-24 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) is widely used in biomedical research to assess the reproducibility of measurements between raters, labs, technicians, or devices. For example, in an inter-rater reliability study, a high ICC value means that noise variability (between-raters and within-raters) is...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-121
更新日期:2014-11-22 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:The initial vanguard cohort of the U.S. National Children's Study was a pregnancy and birth cohort study that sought to enroll some women prior to pregnancy, and to assess exposures early in pregnancy. METHODS:During the recruitment phase (2009-2010), geographically based sampling was used to recruit women ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0067-1
更新日期:2015-09-24 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Clinical quality registries and other systems that conduct routine post-discharge surveillance of patient outcomes following surgery may have difficulty surveying patients who have limited proficiency in the language of the healthcare provider. Interpreter proxies (family and carers) are often used due to li...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0854-1
更新日期:2019-11-14 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Epidemiologic studies often struggle to adequately represent populations and outcomes of interest. Differences in methodology, data analysis and research questions often mean that reviews and synthesis of the existing literature have significant limitations. The current paper details our experiences in combi...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-13-122
更新日期:2013-10-05 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Syntheses of qualitative studies can inform health policy, services and our understanding of patient experience. Meta-ethnography is a systematic seven-phase interpretive qualitative synthesis approach well-suited to producing new theories and conceptual models. However, there are concerns about the quality ...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章,评审
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-119
更新日期:2014-11-19 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Typically, randomization software should allow users to exert control over the different aspects of randomization including block design, provision of unique identifiers and control over the format and type of program output. While some of these characteristics have been addressed by available software, none...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-4-26
更新日期:2004-11-09 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Modern modelling techniques may potentially provide more accurate predictions of binary outcomes than classical techniques. We aimed to study the predictive performance of different modelling techniques in relation to the effective sample size ("data hungriness"). METHODS:We performed simulation studies bas...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-14-137
更新日期:2014-12-22 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Cancer relapses may be useful to predict the risk of death. To take into account relapse information, the Landmark approach is popular. As an alternative, we propose the joint frailty model for a recurrent event and a terminal event to derive dynamic predictions of the risk of death. METHODS:The proposed pr...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-015-0018-x
更新日期:2015-04-01 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Cluster randomised trials with unequal sized clusters often have lower precision than with clusters of equal size. To allow for this, sample sizes are inflated by a modified version of the design effect for clustering. These inflation factors are valid under the assumption that randomisation is stratified by...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/s12874-019-0760-6
更新日期:2019-06-14 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Missing data present a challenge to many research projects. The problem is often pronounced in studies utilizing self-report scales, and literature addressing different strategies for dealing with missing data in such circumstances is scarce. The objective of this study was to compare six different imputatio...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-6-57
更新日期:2006-12-13 00:00:00
abstract:BACKGROUND:Cluster randomised controlled trials (CRCTs) are frequently used in health service evaluation. Assuming an average cluster size, required sample sizes are readily computed for both binary and continuous outcomes, by estimating a design effect or inflation factor. However, where the number of clusters are fix...
journal_title:BMC medical research methodology
pub_type: 杂志文章
doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-102
更新日期:2011-06-30 00:00:00