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Foreword | |
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Introduction: Rationale, potentials and promise of systematic review | |
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Systematic reviews of controlled trials | |
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Principles and procedures | |
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Problems and limitations | |
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Identifying randomised trials | |
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Assessing the quality of controlled clinical trials | |
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Obtaining individual patient data from randomised controlled trials | |
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Assessing the quality of reports of systematic reviews | |
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Investigating variability within and between studies | |
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Going beyond the grand mean | |
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Why and how sources of heterogeneity should be investigated | |
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Analysing the relationship between treatment benefit and underlying risk | |
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Investigating and dealing with publication and other biases | |
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Systematic review of observational studies | |
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Systematic reviews of observational studies | |
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Systematic reviews of prognostic studies | |
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Systematic reviews of evaluations of diagnostic studies | |
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Statistical method and computer software | |
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Statistical methods of examining heterogeneity and combining results from several studies | |
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Choice of effect measure for binary outcomes | |
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Meta-analysis software | |
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Meta-analysis in STATA | |
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Using systematic reviews in practice | |
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Applying the results of systematic reviews at the bedside | |
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Numbers needed to treat derived from meta-analysis: pitfalls and cautions | |
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Using systematic reviews in clinical guidelines development | |
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Using systematic reviews for evidence based policy making | |
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Using systematic reviews for economic evaluation | |
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Using systematic reviews and registers of ongoing trials for scientific and ethical trial design | |
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The Cochrane Collaboration | |
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The Cochrane Collaboration in the 20th Century | |
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The Cochrane Collaboration in the 21st Century: ten challenges and one reason whey they must be met | |
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Future challenges | |
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Unresolved issues and future developments | |