Course Synthesising Evidence: Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews

The course, C189/11 Synthesising Evidence: Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews, is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, autumn 2021.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Recommended knowledge for participation: Completion of core and specific basic courses is required. Completion of “Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology” course. Participants are required to have experience with some sort of software for statistical analysis – e.g. Stata, R, or SAS.

Aim: To introduce PhD students to the basic concepts, methods and issues in meta-analyses and systematic reviews. The course is offered as part of the graduate program in clinical medicine, so the focus will be on epidemiological studies.

Learning outcome: The PhD student will achieve knowledge in:

• Understanding and evaluating meta-analyses
• Conducting systematic reviews
• Assessing heterogeneity between the studies included
• Combining the results from individual studies in a pooled estimate

Contents: The programme will be a mixture of lectures combined with exercises in the following topics:

• The purpose of a systematic review
• Defining, searching and retrieving “the literature” on a topic
• Creating a meta-analytic data set
• Tools for assessing and measuring heterogeneity
• Fixed-effect and random-effects models
• Graphical displays in meta-analysis

The course will comprise of practical exercises using Stata. Participants are required to bring a laptop with a Stata installation version 9 or newer – or an installation of their favourite software for statistical analysis.

Instructors: Professor Olaf Dekkers from Leiden University Medical Center and Aarhus University and Saskia le Cessie from Leiden University Medical Center

Venue: Loftssalen (1266-316), the Victor Albeck Building, Vennelyst Boulevard 4, 8000 Aarhus C.

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Research Year students and Research Honours Programme students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses