Quantitative methods in the review of epidemiologic literature.
Quantitative methods in the review of epidemiologic literature.
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DOI：
10.1093/oxfordjournals.epirev.a036298
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发表时间：
1987
影响因子：
5.5
通讯作者：
S. Greenland
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
S. Greenland
在过去的十年中，荟萃分析方法得到了广泛的发展和传播（1-8）。这方面的发展主要集中在社会科学和政策研究方面，与流行病学的联系主要是通过评估和临床试验研究（9，10）。在流行病学文献综述中采用系统定量方法的相对滞后是可以理解的：社会科学研究人员经常面临涉及数百项研究的综述，因此需要更大的压力来改进摘要技术;政策研究人员必须经常从异质文献中提出一些简单的建议。相比之下，流行病学研究往往较少，研究氛围似乎更适合尝试性的、有限的推论。然而，由于流行病学在过去几十年中的快速发展，传统的叙述性综述不再是总结某些领域的最简单方法。这一增长大部分发生在与政策有关的领域，如风险评估。鉴于这些发展，似乎值得将文献综述的定量方法纳入流行病学方法的主体。
The past decade has seen extensive development and dissemination of methods of meta-analysis (1-8). Most of this development has been concentrated in social science and policy research, with connections to epidemiology occurring primarily through evaluation and clinical trial research (9, 10). The relative lag in the adoption of systematic quantitative methods in reviews of epidemiologic literature is understandable: Social science researchers often face reviews involving hundreds of studies and, consequently, greater pressure to refine summarization techniques; policy researchers must often come up with a few simple recommendations from a heterogeneous literature. In contrast, epidemiologic studies tend to be fewer, and the research atmosphere appears more hospitable to tentative, limited inferences. Nevertheless, because of the rapid growth of epidemiology over the last few decades, the traditional narrative review is no longer the simplest method of summarizing certain areas. Much of this growth has taken place in policy-related areas, such as risk assessment. In view of these developments, it seems worthwhile to incorporate quantitative methods of literature review into the main body of epidemiologic methods.