Course Description
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are critical for evidence-based clinical and public health practices. The widespread and growing application of systematic reviews to synthesize evidence on key research and questions in medical, public health and social science make it useful for health professionals to be able to understand and critique the policy decision based on the research report. This course will provide a detailed description of the systematic review and meta-analysis processes, discuss the strengths and limitations of the method, and provide step-by-step guidance on how to actually perform systematic review and meta-analysis. In addition, it helps doctorate students to write and publish their article in the international journal, including the review literature in their dissertation. Specific topics will cover -formulation of the review question, -searching of literature, -quality assessment of studies, -data extraction, -meta - analytic methods using a Stata software, and report writing. It should be noted that we do not use Cochran standard, i.e. using Review Manager but non-standard.
The course will focus statistical issues such as selection of statistical models for meta-analysis for binary or continues outcome; practical examples of fixed and random effects models as well as examples of methods to evaluate heterogeneity and publication bias; graphical and tabular templates for the presentation of metaanalysis data. STATA software package version 16.1 will be used for the lectures, along with computer lab tutorials on how to effectively use tools such as PubMed and EndNote for conducting reviews. For the Stata lower version might not be work for all newest commands but we will inform you how to resolve in the class, such as using metan or metaan instead of meta form Stata.