The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: VI. How to Use an Overview
Abstract
CLINICAL SCENARIO A 55-year-old man had his serum cholesterol level measured at a shopping mall 2 months ago. His cholesterol level was elevated and he comes to you, his primary care physician, for advice. He does not smoke, is not obese, and does not have hypertension, diabetes mellitus, or any first-order relatives with premature coronary heart disease (CHD). You repeat his cholesterol test and schedule a follow-up appointment. The test confirms an elevated cholesterol level (7.9 mmol/L [305 mg/dL]), but before deciding on a treatment recommendation, you elect to find out just how big a reduction in the risk of CHD this patient could expect from a cholesterollowering diet or drug therapy. THE SEARCH There are a number of cholesterol-lowering trials, and instead of trying to find and review all of the original studies yourself, you use Grateful Med to find a recent overview. On the first subject line you
Overview
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Citations
Cites
Beta blockade during and after myocardial infarction: An overview of the randomized trials
Yusuf, S., Peto, R., Lewis, J., Collins, R., & Sleight, P. (1985) · Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases · doi:10.1016/s0033-0620(85)80003-7 · Cited by 3,205
Publication bias in clinical research
Easterbrook, P. J., Gopalan, R., Berlin, J. A., & Matthews, D. R. (1991) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/0140-6736(91)90201-y · Cited by 3,109 · cited 1×
“likelihood for studies with positive results to be published [16,17,18,19] and the attendant risk for the review to overestimate efficacy or adverse effects.”
BackgroundAn Assessment of Clinically Useful Measures of the Consequences of Treatment
Laupacis, A., Sackett, D. L., & Roberts, R. S. (1988) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198806303182605 · Cited by 1,681
The Existence of Publication Bias and Risk Factors for Its Occurrence
Dickersin, K. (1990) · JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association · doi:10.1001/jama.1990.03440100097014 · Cited by 1,417
Meta-Analysis in Clinical Research
L'ABBÉ, K. A., DETSKY, A. S., & O'ROURKE, K. (1987) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-107-2-224 · Cited by 1,267 · cited 1×
“A number of authors have recently examined issues pertaining to the validity of overviews [4,5,6,7].”
BackgroundYusuf, S. (1991) · JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association · doi:10.1001/jama.1991.03470010097038 · Cited by 1,014 · cited 2×
“However, even when there are large differences between the results of different studies, a summary measure from all of the best available studies may provide the best estimate of the impact of the intervention or exposure [25,26,27].”
BackgroundMuldoon, M. F., Manuck, S. B., & Matthews, K. A. (1990) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.301.6747.309 · Cited by 960
A consumer's guide to subgroup analyses
Oxman, A. D., & Guyatt, G. H. (1992) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-116-1-78 · Cited by 914
Self-citationBias in treatment assignment in controlled clinical trials
Chalmers, T. C., Celano, P., Sacks, H. S., & Smith, H. (1983) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198312013092204 · Cited by 864
The Medical Review Article: State of the Science
MULROW, C. D. (1987) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-106-3-485 · Cited by 856
Cited by
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: the PRISMA statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & for the PRISMA Group (2009) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.b2535 · Cited by 83,823
Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & The PRISMA Group (2009) · PLoS Medicine · doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097 · Cited by 64,042
“Clinicians read them to keep up to date with their field [1,2], and they are often used as a starting point for developing clinical practice guidelines.”
Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: The PRISMA statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., Altman, D. G., & the PRISMA Group* (2009) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-151-4-200908180-00135 · Cited by 37,554
Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: The PRISMA statement
Moher, D., Liberati, A., Tetzlaff, J., & Altman, D. G. (2010) · International Journal of Surgery · doi:10.1016/j.ijsu.2010.02.007 · Cited by 12,156
Shea, B. J., Reeves, B. C., Wells, G., Thuku, M., Hamel, C., Moran, J., Moher, D., Tugwell, P., Welch, V., Kristjansson, E., et al. (2017) · BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.j4008 · Cited by 10,636
Metadata
- Authors
- Oxman, A. D.
- Venue
- JAMA
- Publisher
- American Medical Association (AMA)
- Published
- 1994-11-02
- Volume
- 272
- Issue
- 17
- Pages
- 1367
- ISSN
- 0002-9955 (ISSN-L)
- 0098-7484
- OpenAlex
- W2129829737
- Cited by
- 775
- References
- 10
- FWCI
- 40.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: VI. How to Use an Overview. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1001/jama.1994.03520170077040
- The paper
- Oxman, A. D. (1994). Users' Guides to the Medical Literature: VI. How to Use an Overview. JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1994.03520170077040
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
