Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods最新文献

{"title":"New directions beyond the boundaries of evidence synthesis","authors":"Michael Brown,&nbsp;Ella Flemyng","doi":"10.1002/cesm.12005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/cesm.12005","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Welcome to <i>Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods</i>. A new, open-access journal to facilitate Cochrane's mission of improved health and care decision-making globally.</p><p>Cochrane is an independent and global nonprofit organization committed to producing trusted evidence, advocating for its use, and ensuring it informs health and care decisions. We encourage submissions to <i>Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods</i> from Cochrane's community and seek contributions from the evidence synthesis community at large.</p><p>We are committed to diversity and inclusivity, and to achieve this we have established an Editorial Board that is geographically dispersed, gender-balanced and includes people with lived experience, and with a depth of methodological expertise. As the journal develops, we will continue to monitor the representation on our Editorial Board to ensure it reflects the needs of our wider evidence synthesis community.</p><p>As Cochrane looks beyond its 30th year [<span>1</span>], <i>Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods</i> is a platform that welcomes innovative ideas. This includes how we showcase our commitment to research integrity, including with Open Research Badges [<span>2</span>], embedding consumer involvement within the journal, and improving peer review with a range of different initiatives. We encourage articles that report studies within reviews [<span>3</span>], different types of evidence syntheses that respond to relevant stakeholder questions, for example, gap maps and scoping reviews, and sharing of best practice and case studies to improve efficiencies in evidence synthesis production and ensure our standards are informed by evidence. The editors also encourage accessible language to be used in all submissions, to benefit researchers from across disciplines, nonnative English speakers, and consumers of health.</p><p>We are committed to high research integrity and authors will be able to showcase how they adhere to these practices through research integrity indicators. This includes having a clearly stated question with evidence of stakeholder need or research that informed the question to address issues of unnecessary or duplicative research. For the evidence synthesis we receive, we encourage authors to use patient-important outcomes and/or standardized outcomes, such as those defined by COMET [<span>4</span>]. <i>Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods</i> will also follow Cochrane's conflict of interest policy, expect data sharing, when feasible, and adherence to reporting guidelines, as well as encourage statements about consumer involvement in the research. All of this aims to ensure the research we publish is impactful and combats areas of research waste.</p><p>Our first published paper is the rapid review on the effect of pharmacological interventions for the treatment of people with post-COVID-19 [<span>5</span>], which is an exemplar of the types of rapid reviews we will feature. The authors worke","PeriodicalId":100286,"journal":{"name":"Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/cesm.12005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"50139220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The impact of blinding on trial results: A systematic review and meta-analysis","authors":"T. Pitre, Sarah Kirsh, T. Jassal, Mason Anderson, Adelia Padoan, Alexander Xiang, J. Mah, D. Zeraatkar","doi":"10.1101/2023.03.05.23286821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.05.23286821","url":null,"abstract":"Background: Blinding, the concealment of the arm to which participants have been randomized, is an important consideration for assessing risk of bias of randomized trials. A growing body of evidence has, however, yielded inconsistent results on whether trials without blinding produce biased findings. Objective: To conduct a systematic review and metaanalysis of the evidence addressing whether trials with and without blinding produce different results. Methods: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cochrane Reviews, JBI EBP, and Web of Science, from inception to May 2022, for studies comparing the results of trials with and without blinding. Pairs of reviewers, working independently and in duplicate, reviewed search results for eligible studies and extracted data. We pooled the results of studies comparing trials with and without blinding of patients, healthcare providers/investigators, and outcome assessors/adjudicators using frequentist random-effects meta-analyses. We coded study results such that a ratio of odds ratio (ROR) < 1 and difference in standardized mean difference (dSMD) < 0 indicate that trials without blinding overestimate treatment effects. Results: We identified 47 eligible studies. For dichotomous outcomes, we found low certainty evidence that trials without blinding of patients and healthcare providers, outcome assessors/adjudicators, and patients may slightly overestimate treatment effects. For continuous outcomes, we found low certainty evidence that trials without blinding of outcome assessors/adjudicators and patients may slightly overestimate treatment effects. Conclusion: Our systematic review and meta-analysis suggests that blinding may influence trial results in select situations, albeit the findings are of low certainty and the magnitude of effect is modest. In the absence of high certainty evidence suggesting that trials with and without blinding produce similar results, investigators should be cautious about interpreting the results of trials without blinding.","PeriodicalId":100286,"journal":{"name":"Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91339661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}