Journal of clinical epidemiology
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This article presents official guidance from the Grading of Recommendations Assessments, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) working group on how to address incoherence when assessing the certainty in the evidence from network meta-analysis. Incoherence represents important differences between direct and indirect estimates that contribute to a network estimate. ⋯ Reviewers need to be alert to the possibility of misguidedly arriving at excessively low ratings of certainty by rating down for both incoherence and other closely related GRADE domains. This article describes and illustrates each of these issues and provides explicit guidance on how to deal with them.
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The aim of the article was to assess the appropriateness and rationales of subgroup analyses planned in protocols of randomized controlled trials and reported in subsequent corresponding trial publications. ⋯ Inappropriate specification and reporting of subgroup analyses remain problematic in protocols and reports of randomized controlled trials. Justifications or rationales for subgroup analyses were only rarely provided in trial protocols and reports.