OBJECTIVE To establish the extent to which systematic reviews and meta-analyses of individual participant data (IPD) are being used to inform the recommendations included in published clinical guidelines. DESIGN Descriptive study. SETTING Database maintained by the Cochrane IPD Meta-analysis Methods Group, supplemented by records of published IPD meta-analyses held in a separate database. ...

Network meta-analysis provides a global estimate of comparative treatment effectiveness combining both direct and indirect evidence. In the past decade, the medical literature has witnessed a rapid increase in the possibility to combine evidence from different treatment comparisons. This opportunity is attractive for clinicians since their major concern is to identify the single best available ...

Purpose – The Robots.txt and Robots Meta tags constitute a set of instruments that can be used to instruct software robots. However, the current version of Robots.txt and Robots Meta tags are both too simple and ambiguous in an internet world with many potential conflicts, especially in terms of copyright and trespass to chattels. This paper seeks to propose an amendment to the Robots.txt and R...

The existing resource and topology heterogeneity has divided the scheduling solutions into local schedulers and high-level schedulers (a.k.a. meta-schedulers). Although much work has been proposed to optimise job queue based scheduling, seldom has attention been put on the job sharing behaviours between decentralised distributed resource pools, which in turn raises a notable opportunity to expl...

Deploying lightweight tasks individually on grid resources would lead to a situation where communication overhead dominates the overall application processing time. The communication overhead can be reduced if we group the lightweight tasks at the meta-scheduler before the deployment. However, there is a necessity to limit the number of tasks in a group in order to utilise the resources and the...

The metafor package provides functions for conducting meta-analyses in R. The package includes functions for fitting the meta-analytic fixedand random-effects models and allows for the inclusion of moderators variables (study-level covariates) in these models. Meta-regression analyses with continuous and categorical moderators can be conducted in this way. Functions for the Mantel-Haenszel and ...

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are increasingly common. This article aims to provide guidance for people conducting systematic reviews relevant to the healthcare of older people. An awareness of these issues will also help people reading systematic reviews to determine whether the results will influence their clinical practice. It is essential that systematic reviews are performed by a te...

Manufacturing processes such as monitoring and controlling typically confront the user with a variety of heterogeneous data sources and systems. The cognitive efforts to summarize and combine the data from these different sources affect the user’s efficiency. Our goal is to support the user in his work task by integrating the data and presenting them in a more perceivable way. Hence, we introdu...

INTRODUCTION Individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis (MA) offers advantages over aggregate MA of using standardised criteria for patient characteristics across trials, and allowing reliable investigation of subgroup effects of interventions. Network meta-analysis (NMA) allows for the comparison of multiple treatments in a comprehensive analysis and the determination of the best treatment am...

This paper presents a metadata model for the description of language resources proposed in the framework of the META-SHARE infrastructure, aiming to cover both datasets and tools/technologies used for their processing. It places the model in the overall framework of metadata models, describes the basic principles and features of the model, elaborates on the distinction between minimal and maxim...