New descriptive analysis of more than 22,000 Cochrane meta-analyses published in BMC Medical Research Methodology

A new descriptive analysis of more than 22,000 meta-analyses within Cochrane Reviews has just been published in an open access article in BMC Medical Research Methodology.

Every meta-analysis in the 2321 full reviews in the January 2008 issue of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews was classified according to the healthcare specialty, the types of interventions being compared and the type of outcome. The report includes descriptive statistics for numbers of meta-analyses, numbers of component studies and sample sizes of component studies, broken down by these categories. The authors hope these results will be of interest and provide a useful resource to people throughout The Cochrane Collaboration.