Gavin B Stewart

Newcastle University | NCL

This overview examines research synthesis in applied ecology and conservation. Vote counting and pooling unweighted averages are widespread despite the superiority of syntheses based on weighted combination of effects. Such analyses allow exploration of methodological uncertainty in addition to consistency of effects across species, space and time,...

Lowland heathland habitats are recognized to be of high conservation value throughout north-west Europe. Current management approaches focus on arresting natural succession to woodland, and include the use of vegetation cutting, burning and grazing by livestock. However, the introduction of grazing has proved controversial, highlighting the need fo...

Vegetation trampling resulting from recreation can adversely impact natural habitats, leading to the loss of vegetation and the degradation of plant communities. A considerable primary literature exists on this topic, therefore it is important to assess whether this accumulated evidence can be used to reach general conclusions concerning vegetation...

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Learred Societies.

Unprecedented demand for lithium (Li) is being driven by electric vehicle batteries. Currently, the majority of Li comes from pegmatite mining and salar brines, however, new sources such as geothermal brines will be required to meet future demand. The North Pennines, Northern England has been found to host brines with lithium concentrations exceedi...

Introduction The authors formed a small working group to modernize the Methodological Expectations for Campbell Collaboration Intervention Reviews (MECCIR). We reviewed comments and feedback from editors, peer reviewers of Campbell submissions, and authors; for example, that the Campbell MECCIR was long and some of the items in the reporting and co...

Background Chronic pain is common and costly. Antidepressants are prescribed to reduce pain. However, there has not been a network meta-analysis examining all antidepressants across all chronic pain conditions, so effectiveness and safety for most antidepressants for pain conditions remain unknown. Objective To assess the efficacy and safety of an...

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international network of experts to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and ensuring the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary introduces and explains the framework for patients and the public.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This executive summary outlines the key features of that framework.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Editors and Publishers.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Institutions that undertake research.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Researchers.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Regulators and Policymakers.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Funders of Research.

The ENTRUST-PE project convened an international, interdisciplinary network to develop an integrated framework for enhancing and facilitating the trustworthiness of pain research. This summary outlines the key features of that framework and presents recommendations for Peer Reviewers of research.

The personal, social and economic burden of chronic pain is enormous. Yet patients with chronic pain, clinicians and the public are often poorly served by an evidence architecture that contains multiple structural weaknesses which reduce confidence in treatment practice. Weaknesses include incomplete research governance, a lack of diversity and inc...

Assessing the effectiveness of initiatives on biodiversity is fundamental to conservation science. It is encouraging to see science-policy in this domain embracing meta-analysis as a means of synthesising global evidence (1). Unfortunately, such syntheses rarely utilise guidelines for methodological conduct (2) or reporting (3) developed to support...

Biodiversity monitoring usually involves drawing inferences about some variable of interest across a defined landscape from observations made at a sample of locations within that landscape. If the variable of interest differs between sampled and nonsampled locations, and no mitigating action is taken, then the sample is unrepresentative and inferen...

In the age of big data, it is essential to remember that the size of a dataset is not all that matters. This is particularly true where the goal is to draw inferences about some wider population, in which case it is far more important that the data are representative of that population. It is possible to adjust unrepresentative samples so that they...

Statistics is sometimes described as the science of reasoning under uncertainty. Statistical models provide one view of this uncertainty, but what is frequently neglected is the "invisible" portion of uncertainty: that assumed not to exist once a model has been fitted to some data. Systematic errors, i.e. bias, in data relative to some model and in...

Rapid digitalisation has resulted in a literature about technology acceptance that is ever increasing in size, naturally creating debates about the developments in the field and their implications. Given the size of the literature and the range of factors, theories and applications considered, this article reviewed the relevant literature using a m...

We previously conducted an exploration of the trustworthiness of a group of clinical trials of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and exercise in spinal pain. We identified multiple concerns in eight trials, judging them untrustworthy. In this study, we systematically explored the impact of these trials ("index trials") on results, conclusions and...

Retraction is a mechanism for correcting the scientific record and alerts readers when a study contains unreliable or flawed data. Such data may arise from error or research misconduct. Studies examining the landscape of retracted publications provide insight into the extent of unreliable data and its effect on a medical discipline. We aimed to exp...

Background: Chronic pain is common in adults, and often has a detrimental impact upon physical ability, well-being, and quality of life. Previous reviews have shown that certain antidepressants may be effective in reducing pain with some benefit in improving patients' global impression of change for certain chronic pain conditions. However, there...

Biodiversity monitoring usually involves drawing inferences about some variable of interest across a defined landscape from observations made at a sample of locations within that landscape. If the variable of interest differs between sampled and non-sampled locations, and no mitigating action is taken, then the sample is unrepresentative and infere...

Despite many publications identifying the limitations of vote counting as a method of evidence synthesis this flawed method is still used. Here we highlight the main issues with using vote-counting and what alternatives there are for synthesising evidence.

Nitrogen fertilisation is a common form of agricultural intensification, aimed at increasing biomass, which can affect plant species diversity and ecosystem functioning. Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of nitrogen fertilisation studies in European permanent grasslands, we asked: (i) what relationship form exists between nitrogen applica...

Trustworthiness in clinical trials for persistent pain with unexplained outlying results

It is often difficult to compile and synthesise evidence across multiple studies to inform policy and practice because different outcomes have been measured in different ways or datasets and models have not been fully or consistently reported. In the case of peatlands, a critical terrestrial carbon store, this lack of consistency hampers the eviden...

There is growing interest around the world in more effectively linking public payments to the provision of public goods from agriculture. However, published evidence syntheses suggest mixed, weak or uncertain evidence for many agri-environment scheme options. To inform any future “public money for public goods” based policy, further synthesis work...

There is growing interest around the world in more effectively linking public payments to the provision of public goods from agriculture. However, published evidence syntheses suggest mixed, weak or uncertain evidence for many agri-environment scheme options. To inform any future “public money for public goods” based policy, further synthesis work...

Beef and dairy cattle of temperate farming systems will be studied to investigate the relationships between their methane emissions as well as their efficiencies as milk and beef producers. The investigation will comprehensively utilise all research published on this topic to date via a formalised rapid review and analysing it together through a ne...

Participation is increasingly used to legitimize and improve environmental decision making. However, in practice participants often find the process empty and frustrating. This has adverse consequences for environmental planning and consenting processes, where participants become disillusioned, and negative feelings develop into active opposition,...

Evidence-based medicine is replete with studies assessing quality and bias, but few evaluating research integrity or trustworthiness. A recent Cochrane review of psychological interventions for chronic pain identified trials with a shared lead author with highly divergent results. We sought to systematically identify all similar trials from this au...

Variable study quality is a challenge for all the empirical sciences, but perhaps particularly for disciplines such as ecology where experimentation is frequently hampered by system complexity, scale and resourcing. The resulting heterogeneity, and the necessity of subsequently combining the results of different study designs, is a fundamental issu...

Aggregated species occurrence and abundance data from disparate sources are increasingly accessible to ecologists for the analysis of temporal trends in biodiversity. However, sampling biases relevant to any given research question are often poorly explored and infrequently reported; this can undermine statistical inference. In other disciplines, i...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, their initial opinions and behav...

Phosphorus (P) is a key limiting factor in crop growth and essential for agriculture. As plant uptake of P is inefficient, it is commonly applied to maintain crop yields leading to a range of negative environmental issues when applied in excess. Additionally, P in mineral fertilisers is derived from mined rock phosphate, which is a finite resource...

1. Aggregated species occurrence and abundance data from disparate sources are increasingly accessible to ecologists for the analysis of temporal trends in biodiversity. However, sampling biases relevant to any given research question are often poorly explored and infrequently reported; this has the potential to undermine statistical inference. In...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours...

Consumer food waste, like many environmental behaviours, takes place in private, and is not directly subject to social monitoring. Nevertheless, social interactions can affect private opinions and behaviours. This paper builds an agent-based model of interactions between consumers heterogeneous in their sociability, initial opinions and behaviours...

Our primary research questions are: (1) What is the association between whole grains (WG) intake and the prevalence of NCDs (i.e., type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, cancer, mortality) and their biomarkers? (2) Which biomarker(s) has/have the greatest association with WG intake when combining multiple biomarkers together in the same...

This meta-analysis aims to update and improve upon a previous attempt at understanding the effects neonicotinoids have on non-target terrestrial arthropods. While the original authors carried out sufficient analysis on the data they collected, there are new methodologies that can improve the accuracy of the final effect sizes produced. This new met...

Uplandia: Making better policy in complex upland systems

Since the early 1990s, ecologists and evolutionary biologists have aggregated primary research using meta-analytic methods to understand ecological and evolutionary phenomena. Meta-analyses can resolve long-standing disputes, dispel spurious claims, and generate new research questions. At their worst, however, meta-analysis publications are wolves...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence-based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Phosphorus is closely linked to other nutrient cycles, notably carbon and nitrogen, therefore, to understand potential risks to food production models are required that simulate integrated nutrient cycling over long timescales. The soil-plant system model N14CP meets these requirements and simulates both semi-natural and agricultural environments....

Objectives This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess the comparative efficacy and safety of antidepressants for adults with chronic pain. We will achieve this by: assessing the efficacy of antidepressants by type, class and dose in improving pain, mood, patient global impression of change, p...

1. To be effective, the next generation of conservation practitioners and managers need to be critical thinkers with a deep understanding of how to make evidence‐based decisions and of the value of evidence synthesis. 2. If, as educators, we do not make these priorities a core part of what we teach, we are failing to prepare our students to make an...

Purpose Agri-food supply chains are facing a number of challenges, which cause inefficiencies resulting in the waste of natural and economic resources, and in negative environmental and social impacts. Food waste (FW) is a result of such inefficiencies and supply chain actors search for economically viable innovations to prevent and reduce it. This...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Traditional approaches to reviewing literature may be susceptible to bias and result in incorrect decisions. This is of particular concern when reviews address policy- and practice-relevant questions. Systematic reviews have been introduced as a more rigorous approach to synthesizing evidence across studies; they rely on a suite of evidence-based m...

There is growing interest around the world in more effectively linking public payments to the provision of public goods from agriculture. However, published evidence syntheses suggest mixed, weak or uncertain evidence for many agri-environment scheme options. To inform any future “public money for public goods” based policy, further synthesis work...

Variable study quality is a challenge for all the empirical sciences, but perhaps particularly for disciplines such as ecology where experimentation is frequently hampered by system complexity, scale, and resourcing. The resulting heterogeneity, and the necessity of subsequently combining the results of different study designs, is a fundamental iss...

In this reply, we confirm that the results of the original paper are robust and that our conclusions were correct: densities of Ruddy Turnstones Arenaria interpres were lower on sites located further from undisturbed refuges. There are two points of learning here: (i) taking the findings of a paper based purely on what is published is normal but th...

There is an immediate need for a change in research workflows so that pre-existing knowledge is better used in designing new research. A formal assessment of the accumulated knowledge prior to research approval would reduce the waste of already limited resources caused by asking low priority questions.

Capsule: Wintering Ruddy Turnstones Arenaria interpres occur in higher densities and their populations decline less on, or close to, offshore refuges than on mainland sites subject to greater levels of human disturbance. Aim: To compare wintering densities of Ruddy Turnstones and changes in counts across time from sites with differing levels of hum...

The generation of food waste at both the supplier and the consumer levels stems from a complex set of interacting behaviours. Computational and mathematical models provide various methods to simulate, diagnose and predict different aspects within the complex system of food waste generation and prevention. This chapter outlines four different modell...

With the possible development of a shale gas industry within the UK, many review studies have been written in an attempt to further understand and identify potential environmental impacts related to shale gas extraction. However, until now, these review studies have not been critically assessed to determine their rigor. This article outlines the pr...

Where research does not lead to benefits to society, it may be considered a waste of resources, especially when publicly funded. A formal assessment of the accumulated knowledge prior to research approval would reduce the waste of already limited resources caused by asking low priority questions. There is an urgent need for a change in research wor...

Many members of the public and important stakeholders operating at the upper end of the food chain, may be unfamiliar with how food is produced, including within modern animal production systems. The intensification of production is becoming increasingly common in modern farming. However, intensive systems are particularly susceptible to production...

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are presented as highly connected: an ‘interrelated’ and ‘indivisible’ agenda with a need for policy coherence for implementation. We analyse the relationships among the goals using formal systems analysis and find that the connections between goals are uneven, with a failure to integrate gender equality, pe...

The choice of animal-based traits to identify and deal with production diseases is often a challenge for pig farmers, researchers and other related professionals. This systematic review focused on production diseases, that is, the diseases that arise from management practices, affecting the digestive, locomotory and respiratory system of pigs. The...

Conservation decisions are challenging, not only because they often involve difficult conflicts among outcomes that people value, but because our understanding of the natural world and our effects on it is fraught with uncertainty. Value of Information (VoI) methods provide an approach for understanding and managing uncertainty from the standpoint...

The proposed protocol is for a rapid evidence synthesis analysis into the use of livestock exclusion fencing as an on-farm intervention for improving water quality. The primary objectives are to assess the use of livestock exclusion fencing to improve water quality by reducing nutrient load, the presence of faecal indicator organisms and sediment l...

The proposed protocol is for a rapid evidence synthesis analysis into the use of livestock exclusion fencing as an on-farm intervention for improving water quality. The primary objectives are to assess the use of livestock exclusion fencing to improve water quality by reducing nutrient load, the presence of faecal indicator organisms and sediment l...