All Stories

  1. Regression to the mean: a primer for evidence-based medicine practitioners

    Article • BMJ evidence-based medicine, December 2025, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  2. BIAS, BENEFIT, OR BOTH? SURVEYING PERCEPTIONS OF AI IN HEALTHCARE

    Article • December 2025, Center for Open Science

    Lifeng Lin

  3. Benchmarking DNA foundation models for genomic and genetic tasks

    Article • Nature Communications, November 2025, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  4. An alternative method for assessing the fragility of survival analysis results: a proof-of-concept study based on the log-rank test

    Article • American Journal of Epidemiology, October 2025, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Lifeng Lin

  5. Leveraging AI for Meta‐Analysis: Evaluating LLMs in Detecting Publication Bias for Next‐Generation Evidence Synthesis

    Article • Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods, September 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  6. Retiring the Term “Weighted Mean Difference” in Contemporary Evidence Synthesis

    Article • Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods, September 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  7. Lifecycles of Cochrane Systematic Reviews (2003–2024): A Bibliographic Study

    Article • Cochrane Evidence Synthesis and Methods, August 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  8. Prospective registration was associated with a reduced risk of bias for randomized controlled trials: a meta-research study

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, August 2025, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  9. Post‐cesarean skin closure with metal staples versus subcuticular suture in obese patients: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials

    Article • Pregnancy, July 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  10. Tipping point analysis in network meta-analysis

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, June 2025, Cambridge University Press

    Lifeng Lin

  11. Prediction Performance of Earlier Studies for Later Studies in Cochrane Reviews

    Article • Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, June 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  12. Lack of reproducibility of trial sequential analyses: a meta-epidemiological study

    Article • Trials, March 2025, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  13. Confidence intervals of the relative risk and odds ratio can predict when the optimal information size in a meta-analysis is not met

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, March 2025, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  14. Trial sequential analysis involving same-year studies requires careful temporal ordering

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, March 2025, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  15. The Role of Double‐Zero‐Event Studies in Evidence Synthesis: Evaluating Robustness Using the Fragility Index

    Article • Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, January 2025, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  16. Assessment of inverse publication bias in safety outcomes: an empirical analysis

    Article • BMC Medicine, October 2024, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  17. Robustness Assessment of Oncology Dose-Finding Trials Using the Modified Fragility Index

    Article • Cancers, October 2024, MDPI AG

    Lifeng Lin

  18. Towards the automatic risk of bias assessment on randomized controlled trials: A comparison of RobotReviewer and humans

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, September 2024, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  19. Meta-analysis of continuous outcomes: a user’s guide for analysis and interpretation

    Article • BMJ evidence-based medicine, August 2024, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  20. A brief note on the common (fixed)-effect meta-analysis model: comment on Veroniki and McKenzie

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, July 2024, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  21. Comparisons of various estimates of the I2 statistic for quantifying between-study heterogeneity in meta-analysis

    Article • Statistical Methods in Medical Research, March 2024, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  22. Comparisons of the mean differences and standardized mean differences for continuous outcome measures on the same scale

    Article • JBI Evidence Synthesis, February 2024, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  23. Structural Equation Modeling Using R/SAS: A Step-by-Step Approach with Real Data Analysis

    Article • Journal of the American Statistical Association, February 2024, Taylor & Francis

    Lifeng Lin

  24. Sensitivity analysis with iterative outlier detection for systematic reviews and meta‐analyses

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, February 2024, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  25. Choice of link functions for generalized linear mixed models in meta-analyses of proportions

    Article • Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences, December 2023, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  26. The impact of studies with no events in both arms on meta-analysis of rare events: A simulation study using generalized linear mixed model

    Article • Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences, December 2023, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  27. Bayesian hierarchical models incorporating study‐level covariates for multivariate meta‐analysis of diagnostic tests without a gold standard with application to COVID‐19

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, September 2023, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  28. The Active Ingredient in Reading Comprehension Strategy Intervention for Struggling Readers: A Bayesian Network Meta-analysis

    Article • Review of Educational Research, May 2023, American Educational Research Association (AERA)

    Lifeng Lin

  29. Methods for deriving risk difference (absolute risk reduction) from a meta-analysis

    Article • BMJ, May 2023, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  30. The normality assumption on between-study random effects was questionable in a considerable number of Cochrane meta-analyses

    Article • BMC Medicine, March 2023, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  31. Assessing the robustness of results from clinical trials and meta-analyses with the fragility index

    Article • American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, March 2023, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  32. THE EFFECT DIRECTION SHOULD BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT WHEN ASSESSING SMALL-STUDY EFFECTS

    Article • Journal of Evidence Based Dental Practice, March 2023, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  33. Meta-analysis methods for risk difference: A comparison of different models

    Article • Statistical Methods in Medical Research, November 2022, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  34. Data extraction error in pharmaceutical versus non-pharmaceutical interventions for evidence synthesis: Study protocol for a crossover trial

    Article • August 2022, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  35. Limits in the search date for rapid reviews of diagnostic test accuracy studies

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, August 2022, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  36. A Retrospective Analysis of Biological Complications of Dental Implants

    Article • International Journal of Dentistry, August 2022, Hindawi Publishing Corporation

    Lifeng Lin

  37. A Bayesian model for combining standardized mean differences and odds ratios in the same meta-analysis

    Article • Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, August 2022, Taylor & Francis

    Lifeng Lin

  38. Synthesizing evidence from the earliest studies to support decision‐making: To what extent could the evidence be reliable?

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, July 2022, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  39. Assessing and visualizing fragility of clinical results with binary outcomes in R using the fragility package

    Article • PLOS One, June 2022, PLOS

    Lifeng Lin

  40. Accounting for publication bias using a bivariate trim and fill meta‐analysis procedure

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, May 2022, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  41. Meta-analysis methods for risk difference: a comparison of different models

    Article • May 2022, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  42. Empirical comparisons of meta-analysis methods for diagnostic studies: a meta-epidemiological study

    Article • BMJ Open, May 2022, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  43. Comment on a review of methods to assess publication and other reporting biases in meta‐analysis

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, March 2022, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  44. Empirical comparisons of heterogeneity magnitudes of the risk difference, relative risk, and odds ratio

    Article • Systematic Reviews, February 2022, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  45. The Odds Ratio is “portable” across baseline risk but not the Relative Risk: Time to do away with the log link in binomial regression

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, February 2022, Elsevier

    Tawanda Chivese, Lifeng Lin

  46. Bridging randomized controlled trials and single-arm trials using commensurate priors in arm-based network meta-analysis

    Article • The Annals of Applied Statistics, December 2021, Institute of Mathematical Statistics

    Lifeng Lin

  47. A penalization approach to random‐effects meta‐analysis

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, November 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  48. Methodological quality for systematic reviews of adverse events with surgical interventions: a cross-sectional survey

    Article • BMC Medical Research Methodology, October 2021, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  49. Predictive P-score for treatment ranking in Bayesian network meta-analysis

    Article • BMC Medical Research Methodology, October 2021, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  50. Estimating Partial Standardized Mean Differences from Regression Models

    Article • The Journal of Experimental Education, October 2021, Taylor & Francis

    Lifeng Lin

  51. Rapid evidence synthesis approach for limits on the search date: How rapid could it be?

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, September 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  52. Empirical Comparisons of 12 Meta-analysis Methods for Synthesizing Proportions of Binary Outcomes

    Article • Journal of General Internal Medicine, September 2021, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  53. The impact of studies with no events in both arms on meta-analysis of rare events: a simulation study using generalized linear mixed model

    Article • August 2021, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  54. Synthesis of evidence from zero‐events studies: A comparison of one‐stage framework methods

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, August 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  55. Good Statistical Practices for Contemporary Meta-Analysis: Examples Based on a Systematic Review on COVID-19 in Pregnancy

    Article • BioMedInformatics, July 2021, MDPI AG

    Lifeng Lin

  56. Bayesian meta‐analysis using SAS PROC BGLIMM

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, July 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  57. A proposed framework to guide evidence synthesis practice for meta-analysis with zero-events studies

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, July 2021, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  58. Utilization of the evidence from studies with no events in meta-analyses of adverse events: an empirical investigation

    Article • BMC Medicine, June 2021, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  59. Methodological assessment of systematic reviews and meta‐analyses on COVID ‐19: A meta‐epidemiological study

    Article • Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, May 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  60. Double-zero-event studies matter: A re-evaluation of physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection for preventing person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 and its policy impact

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, May 2021, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  61. Bayesian Methods for Meta-Analyses of Binary Outcomes: Implementations, Examples, and Impact of Priors

    Article • International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, March 2021, MDPI AG

    Lifeng Lin

  62. The influence of insertion torque values on the failure and complication rates of dental implants: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

    Article • Clinical Implant Dentistry and Related Research, March 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  63. Many meta-analyses of rare events in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews were underpowered

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, March 2021, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  64. Empirical assessment of prediction intervals in Cochrane meta‐analyses

    Article • European Journal of Clinical Investigation, February 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  65. Prior Choices of Between-Study Heterogeneity in Contemporary Bayesian Network Meta-analyses: an Empirical Study

    Article • Journal of General Internal Medicine, January 2021, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  66. Systematic identification of risk factors and drug repurposing options for Alzheimer's disease

    Article • Alzheimer s & Dementia Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, January 2021, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  67. BayesSenMC: an R package for Bayesian Sensitivity Analysis of Misclassification

    Article • The R Journal, January 2021, The R Foundation

    Lifeng Lin

  68. Evidence inconsistency degrees of freedom in Bayesian network meta-analysis

    Article • Journal of Biopharmaceutical Statistics, December 2020, Taylor & Francis

    Lifeng Lin

  69. Protocols for meta-analysis of intervention safety seldom specified methods to deal with rare events

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, December 2020, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  70. PALM: Patient-centered Treatment Ranking via Large-scale Multivariate Network Meta-analysis

    Article • November 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  71. Evaluation of various estimators for standardized mean difference in meta‐analysis

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, November 2020, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  72. Questionable utility of the relative risk in clinical research: a call for change to practice

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, November 2020, Elsevier

    Tawanda Chivese, Lifeng Lin

  73. A Bayesian Approach for Determining the Relationship Between Various Elongate Mineral Particles (EMPs) Definitions

    Article • Annals of Work Exposures and Health, November 2020, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Lifeng Lin

  74. Fragility index of network meta-analysis with application to smoking cessation data

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, November 2020, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  75. Peto odds ratios demonstrate no advantage over classic odds ratios in meta-analysis of binary rare outcomes

    Article • October 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  76. Meta-analysis of Proportions Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models

    Article • Epidemiology, September 2020, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  77. Double-zero-event studies matter: a re-evaluation of physical distancing, face masks, and eye protection for preventing person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 and its policy impact

    Article • August 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  78. A variance shrinkage method improves arm-based Bayesian network meta-analysis

    Article • Statistical Methods in Medical Research, August 2020, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  79. Accounting for small-study effects using a bivariate trim and fill meta-analysis procedure

    Article • July 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  80. Arcsine‐based transformations for meta‐analysis of proportions: Pros, cons, and alternatives

    Article • Health Science Reports, July 2020, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  81. Systematic identification of modifiable risk factors and drug repurposing options for Alzheimer’s disease: Mendelian randomization analyses

    Article • July 2020, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press

    Lifeng Lin

  82. Exclusion of studies with no events in both arms in meta-analysis impacted the conclusions

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, July 2020, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  83. Effects of treatment classifications in network meta-analysis

    Article • Research Methods in Medicine & Health Sciences, June 2020, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  84. A Bayesian approach to assessing small‐study effects in meta‐analysis of a binary outcome with controlled false positive rate

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, June 2020, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  85. Laplace approximation, penalized quasi-likelihood, and adaptive Gauss–Hermite quadrature for generalized linear mixed models: towards meta-analysis of binary outcome with sparse data

    Article • BMC Medical Research Methodology, June 2020, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  86. Factors that impact fragility index and their visualizations

    Article • Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, June 2020, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  87. The impact of covariance priors on arm‐based Bayesian network meta‐analyses with binary outcomes

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, June 2020, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  88. Hybrid test for publication bias in meta-analysis

    Article • Statistical Methods in Medical Research, April 2020, SAGE Publications

    Lifeng Lin

  89. P value–driven methods were underpowered to detect publication bias: analysis of Cochrane review meta-analyses

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, February 2020, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  90. On evidence cycles in network meta-analysis

    Article • Statistics and Its Interface, January 2020, International Press of Boston

    Lifeng Lin

  91. Use of Prediction Intervals in Network Meta-analysis

    Article • JAMA Network Open, August 2019, American Medical Association (AMA)

    Lifeng Lin

  92. The magnitude of small-study effects in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: an empirical study of nearly 30 000 meta-analyses

    Article • BMJ evidence-based medicine, July 2019, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  93. Comparison of four heterogeneity measures for meta‐analysis

    Article • Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, June 2019, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  94. The trim-and-fill method for publication bias: practical guidelines and recommendations based on a large database of meta-analyses

    Article • Medicine, June 2019, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  95. Real-world Performance of Meta-analysis Methods for Double-Zero-Event Studies with Dichotomous Outcomes Using the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

    Article • Journal of General Internal Medicine, March 2019, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  96. Graphical augmentations to sample-size-based funnel plot in meta-analysis

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, February 2019, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  97. Borrowing of strength from indirect evidence in 40 network meta-analyses

    Article • Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, February 2019, Elsevier

    Lifeng Lin

  98. When continuous outcomes are measured using different scales: guide for meta-analysis and interpretation

    Article • BMJ, January 2019, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  99. Performance of Between-study Heterogeneity Measures in the Cochrane Library

    Article • Epidemiology, November 2018, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  100. Re: Incidence and Risk Factors for Prediabetes and Diabetes Mellitus Among HIV-infected Adults on Antiretroviral Therapy: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

    Article • Epidemiology, November 2018, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  101. Comparison between PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors (nivolumab, pembrolizumab, and atezolizumab) in pretreated NSCLC patients: Evidence from a Bayesian network model

    Article • International Journal of Cancer, September 2018, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  102. Bias caused by sampling error in meta-analysis with small sample sizes

    Article • PLOS One, September 2018, PLOS

    Lifeng Lin

  103. Quantifying and presenting overall evidence in network meta-analysis

    Article • Statistics in Medicine, July 2018, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  104. Empirical Comparison of Publication Bias Tests in Meta-Analysis

    Article • Journal of General Internal Medicine, April 2018, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  105. The effect of publication bias magnitude and direction on the certainty in evidence

    Article • BMJ evidence-based medicine, April 2018, BMJ

    Lifeng Lin

  106. Bayesian multivariate meta-analysis of multiple factors

    Article • Research Synthesis Methods, March 2018, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  107. Quantifying publication bias in meta-analysis

    Article • Biometrics, November 2017, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  108. Rejoinder to “quantifying publication bias in meta-analysis”

    Article • Biometrics, November 2017, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin

  109. Cross channel effects of search engine advertising on brick & mortar retail sales: Meta analysis of large scale field experiments on Google.com

    Article • Quantitative Marketing and Economics, August 2017, Springer Science + Business Media

    Lifeng Lin

  110. Performing Arm-Based Network Meta-Analysis in R with the pcnetmeta Package

    Article • Journal of Statistical Software, January 2017, Foundation for Open Access Statistic

    Lifeng Lin

  111. An adaptive two-sample test for high-dimensional means

    Article • Biometrika, September 2016, Oxford University Press (OUP)

    Lifeng Lin

  112. Sensitivity to Excluding Treatments in Network Meta-analysis

    Article • Epidemiology, July 2016, Wolters Kluwer Health

    Lifeng Lin

  113. Alternative measures of between-study heterogeneity in meta-analysis: Reducing the impact of outlying studies

    Article • Biometrics, May 2016, Wiley

    Lifeng Lin