ReviewBMJ global health2025
Towards a complex systems model of evidence for public health.
Review in BMJ global health, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Student mental wellbeing as an interconnected system: positioning academic, social, and coping processes.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Implementation of lifestyle recommendations in the Dutch medical specialists' guidelines: a mixed-methods cross-sectional survey study.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Trends in anxiety and depressive symptoms among adults in Norway based on eight population-based surveys from 1995 to 2024.Discover mental health · 2026Article
- Implementation evaluation of a whole systems approach (WSA) to childhood overweight and obesity in local communities: findings from the Children and Families Pilot in Wales, UK.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Leadership matters: a systems approach to strengthening the quality of child and youth mental health care.European journal of public health · 2026Article
- Conceptualization and implementation of community social prescribing evaluation: a case study of the co-designedFrontiers in public health · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There has been growing interest in the adoption of complex systems approaches to tackle major public health challenges such as obesity. This perspective redirects focus from individually oriented and narrowly focused interventions towards strategies that reshape structural drivers of health and disease across multiple levels, offering novel avenues for enhancing population health and tackling health inequalities. Despite growing consensus on the use of a complex systems model of evidence to support these kinds of approaches, there remains limited agreement on the types of evidence required both to understand and to tackle complex public health problems. In this paper, we propose a complex systems model of evidence that combines three types of evidence-causal, intervention, implementation-across three dimensions of complex systems-mechanisms, dynamics and patterns. This model thus identifies nine categories of evidence:
Indexed as
Identifiers
What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.