This month in Overcite: New methodology publications: Comprehensive modeling of publication bias; insight into labour intensity of systematic reviews; improving transparency and rigour in rapid evidence synthesis; investigating the causes of bias in scientific research. New systematic reviews: Application of systematic review methods in chemical risk assessment – cardiovascular risk and arsenic exposure; effectiveness of improved […]
A couple of interesting webinars are coming up in the next few weeks, presenting two different software toolkits which support the production of systematic reviews. Webinar #1 // DRAGON Registration links: webinar Jan 23 webinar Jan 28 In this webinar, ICF International experts discuss DRAGON, a suite of tools developed by ICF to streamline the […]
An illustrative case of the pitfalls in assessing methodological quality is given by an interesting and recent review of all published epidemiological research looking at the neurodevelopmental effects of prenatal and postnatal exposure to organophosphate pesticides (González-Alzaga et al. 2013). This study uses compliance with STROBE criteria, a checklist which has been developed to strengthen […]
This is probably unique.
EFSA’s Scientific Assessment Support (SAS) Unit has launched an open consultation on the Draft Guidance on Expert Knowledge Elicitation in Food and Feed Safety Risk Assessment http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/consultations/call/130813.htm The document proposes a process to help the Authority access specialist knowledge on parameters for use in risk assessments when relevant information is not available in scientific literature or […]
A while ago EFSA produced a short video explaining what cumulative risk assessment is. This is a good idea: chemical mixtures are increasingly an issue of public concern, as awareness of the failure risk assessment process to take into account chemical mixtures becomes more widely known. I think there are questions about how well this […]
I just heard from Patrice Sutton, one of the architects of the Navigation Guide, that a new study has been published ahead of print in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP) addressing the long-standing debate about how to assess weight of evidence for environmental chemicals and other hazards, and the use of animal evidence in […]
Critiquing lobbyists’ and special interest groups’ critical responses to scientific reviews and publications can be like shooting fish in a barrel. I only bother in cases when I get particularly ticked off by a critique because it is just so lazy in comparison to the document criticised and so comprehensively fails itself to meet the […]
Something which came to my attention the other day (though it was published in February) is that EFSA has published a call for tender for “Scientific services to support EFSA systematic reviews in the field of plant health risk assessment”. For anyone not intimately familiar with the processes by which the European agencies procure services, […]
I have been looking forward to this for a long time: the publication of NTP / OHAT systematic review draft protocols for the association between BPA exposure and obesity, and PFOA/PFOS exposure and immunotoxicity. I am particularly interested in how they propose managing the different streams of evidence from toxicological research (a major difference between […]