Back to: Extract Data

When you’re extracting data, you can often gather the same information for the intervention and the comparator.

That’s because, as you might remember, the comparator is just another intervention, a placebo, or the standard treatment for a specific disease or condition. In other words, it’s whatever the research study is using as a comparison for the intervention.

In fact, we often use the word “arm” to describe both the comparator and the interventions, where each “arm” represents a different treatment approach. A study may have several arms if several different treatments are being compared. You’ll want to extract the same type of data for each arm, so you can create a fair comparison between each approach.