Systematic review of applied transportability and generalizability analyses: A landscape analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transportability and generalizability analysis are novel causal inference methods that quantitatively assess external validity. Currently, it is unclear how these analyses are applied in practice. To characterize applications and methods, we conducted a landscape analysis of applied transportability and generalizability analyses using a systematic literature search of PubMed, CINAHL and Embase supplemented with hand-searches. We identified 68 publications describing transportability and generalizability analyses conducted with 83 unique source-target dataset pairs and reporting 99 distinct analyses. The majority of source and target datasets were collected in the US (n = 63/83, 75.9 %; and n = 59/83, 71.1 %, respectively). These methods were most often applied to transport RCT findings to observational studies (n = 38/83; 45.8 %), or to another RCT (n = 20/83; 24.1 %). Several studies used transportability analysis outside the standard application, for example to identify effect modifiers or calibrate measurements within an RCT. Methods that used weights and individual-level patient data were most common (n = 56/99, 56.5 %; n = 80/83, 96.4 %, respectively). Reporting quality varied across studies. Transportability analysis has a wide range of applications including supporting decision-making by improving evidence relevance and improving trial design by identifying contextual effect modifiers and calibrating outcome measurements. Efforts are needed to standardize analysis and reporting of these methods to improve transparency and uptake.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.393 | 0.708 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.043 | 0.052 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".