MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4408649545 · doi:10.1136/bmj-2024-079839

Risk of Bias in Network Meta-Analysis (RoB NMA) tool

2025· article· en· W4408649545 on OpenAlexaff
Carole Lunny, Julian P. T. Higgins, Ian R. White, Sofia Dias, Brian Hutton, James M Wright, Areti-Angeliki Veroniki, Penny Whiting, Andrea C. Tricco

Bibliographic record

VenueBMJ · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicMeta-analysis and systematic reviews
Canadian institutionsQueen's UniversityUniversity of TorontoOttawa Public HealthOttawa HospitalPrecision Nanosystems (Canada)University of OttawaPublic Health OntarioUniversity of British ColumbiaMD Precision (Canada)St. Michael's Hospital
FundersNational Institute for Health and Care Research
KeywordsComputer scienceMeta-analysisWorld Wide WebData scienceInformation retrievalMedicineInternal medicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Systematic reviews with network meta-analysis (NMA) have potential biases in their conduct, analysis, and interpretation. If the results or conclusions of an NMA are integrated into policy or practice without any consideration of risks of bias, decisions could unknowingly be based on incorrect results, which could translate to poor patient outcomes. The RoB NMA (Risk of Bias in Network Meta-Analysis) tool answers a clearly defined need for a rigorously developed tool to assess risk of bias in NMAs of healthcare interventions. In this guidance article, we describe and provide a justification for the tool’s 17 items, their mechanism of bias, pertinent examples, and how to assess an NMA based on each response option.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.296
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.671
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.704
Threshold uncertainty score0.868

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.2960.671
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0050.004
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0120.035
Bibliometrics0.0190.011
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0070.008
Open science0.0050.013
Research integrity0.0080.010
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0540.005

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.

Opus teacher head0.828
GPT teacher head0.562
Teacher spread0.266 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
DomainMethods
GenreMethods

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".

Quick stats

Citations24
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueBMJSame topicMeta-analysis and systematic reviewsFrench-language works237,207