BACKGROUND Systematic reviews of published time-to-event outcomes commonly rely on calculating odds ratios (OR) at fixed points in time and where actual numbers at risk are not presented. These estimates are usually based on the total numbers included in the published analysis and take no account of censoring. We have assessed the impact of adjusting for censoring on weighting, estimates and st...

Technology fit is the focus of Media Richness [2] and Task-Technology Interaction [23]; and Group-Task coordination is the essence of the Coordination Theory [12] and [13]. Each of these theories tries to explain the interaction of the three contextual elements (Technology, Groups and Tasks) by focusing on a particular dyad. This paper reviews and integrates some of the theoretical and empirica...

AIMS To summarise recent literature on the risk of prostate cancer in pesticide related occupations, to calculate the meta-rate ratio, and to compare it to data from meta-analyses previously published. METHODS A meta-analysis of 22 epidemiological studies, published between 1995 and 2001, was conducted in order to pool their rate ratio estimates. Studies were summarised and evaluated for homo...

Meta-analysis plays an important role in the analysis and interpretation of clinical trials in medicine and of trials in the social sciences but is of importance in other fields (e.g., particle physics [1]) as well. In 2001, Hartung andKnapp [2,3] introduced a new approach to test for a nonzero treatment effect in ametaanalysis of k studies. Hartung and Knapp [2, 3] suggest to use the random ef...

BACKGROUND Women in high resource nations are increasingly delaying childbearing until their thirties. Delayed childbearing poses challenges for the spacing of a woman's pregnancies. Inter-pregnancy intervals <12 months are associated with risk for adverse pregnancy outcome, yet increased maternal age at delivery is linked with increased risk. The optimal inter-pregnancy interval for older moth...

The authors evaluated whether statistically significant violations of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) or the magnitude of deviations from HWE may contribute to the problem of replicating postulated gene-disease associations across different studies. Forty-two gene-disease associations assessed in meta-analyses of 591 studies were examined. Studies with disease-free controls in which HWE was vi...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether the association of inadequate or unclear allocation concealment and lack of blinding with biased estimates of intervention effects varies with the nature of the intervention or outcome. DESIGN Combined analysis of data from three meta-epidemiological studies based on collections of meta-analyses. DATA SOURCES 146 meta-analyses including 1346 trials examining a w...

OBJECTIVE To assess the socioeconomic, geographical and demographic inequities in the use of postnatal health-care services in low- and middle-income countries. METHODS We searched Medline, Embase and Cochrane Central databases and grey literature for experimental, quasi-experimental and observational studies that had been conducted in low- and middle-income countries. We summarized the relev...