The July 2013 issue of Medical Decision Making includes a series of 7 tutorial papers on evidence synthesis methods for decision making.  Dias S, Welton NJ, Sutton AJ, Ades AE Evidence Synthesis for Decision Making  Med Decis Making July 2013 33: 597-606, doi:10.1177/0272989X13487604

In the introductory paper, the authors state:

As far as we know, an overall account of evidence synthesis has not been attempted before. In this series of papers we present a single framework that covers fixed and random effects models, in which pairwise meta-analysis, indirect comparisons, and 2-arm trials are special cases of networks, and indeed of multiarm trials, and in which outcomes expressed in several different reporting formats can be analyzed without recourse to normal approximations that are known to be problematic