Material from the Bias Methods Group annual meetings 2025

On October 21 and 22, the 2025 annual Bias Methods Group meetings were held online. Recordings will be available on our YouTube channel.

Meeting 1, October 21

At the meeting, A/Prof Ying Wang, the lead author of the new risk of bias tool, ROBUST-RCT, presented the tool. Some remarks from Prof Jonathan Sterne were followed by a general discussion.

Ying Wang
Centre for Evidence-Based Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Beijing China
Introduction to ROBUST-RCT (Risk Of Bias instrument for Use in SysTematic reviews for Randomised Controlled Trials) (slides available here)

Jonathan Sterne
Department of Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
ROBUST-RCT versus other tools (slides available here)

Meeting 2, October 22

At the meeting, we provided updates on important methodological projects.

Presenters included:

Asbjørn Hróbjartsson
Bias Methods Group Co-convenor
An overview of the Bias Methods Group activities 2024-2025 is available here. 

Silvia Minozzi
Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri IRCCS, Milan, Italy
A qualitative study on the use of GRADE and CINeMA: time-consuming, process transparency and subjectivity versus high-speed, technical challenges and poor understanding (slides available here)

Cassandra Laurie and Giorgia Sulis
School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Canada
Improving risk-of-bias assessment and reporting in vaccine effectiveness research: introduction to the RoB-VE project (slides available here).