This article identifies and unpacks three key decision points in a systematic mixed research synthesis, a mixed methods approach to research synthesis. The research community has increasingly recognized the value of synthesis studies in expanding our understanding of phenomena. Mixed-methodology broadly has also gained ground as a pragmatic…

Launching biomedical innovations based on clinical demands instead of translating basic research findings to practice reduces the risk that the results will not fit the clinical routine. To realize this type of innovation, a meta-analysis of the body of research is necessary to reveal demand-matching concepts. However, both the data deluge and the…

Systematic reviewers conducting pairwise meta-analyses sometimes encounter multi-arm studies. To include these studies, and to avoid a unit-of-analysis error, often two or more arms are combined or the control arm is split. In this tutorial, we present 5 different approaches that can be used. Particularly, we present a novel approach (method 4)…

In studies with time-to-event data, outcomes may be reported as hazard ratios (HR) or binomial counts/proportions at a specific time point. If the intent is to synthesise evidence by performing a meta-analysis or network meta-analysis (NMA) using the HR as the measure of treatment effect, studies that only report binomial data cannot be included…