In evidence-based medicine, meta-analysis is an important statistical technique for combining the findings from independent clinical trials which have attempted to answer similar questions about treatment's clinical eectiveness [1]. Normally, such meta-analyses are pair-wise treatment...

Clinical trials provide pivotal evidence on drug efficacy and safety. The evidence, information from clinical trials, is currently used by regulatory decision makers in marketing authorization decisions, but only in an implicit manner. For clinical trials information to be used in a transparent...