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Critical Thinking (CT) which has been defined as the employment of cognitive skills or strategies for obtaining sound conclusions (Halpern, 2013) has been the subject of different Second Language (L2) studies at national and international levels. The aim of the present study was to provide a meta-analysis on the (quasi) experimental studies of critical thinking in second language education in Iran. To this end, from a total of 168 studies published between 2011 and 2020, 24 studies were selected based on the inclusion-exclusion criteria. The included studies were coded to calculate the mean effect size of the studies. The results show that 1) L2 teaching was positively effective for the CT development in Iran; 2) the most beneficial aspects of L2 teaching on CT promotion were related to teaching L2 speaking and L2 rhetorical strategies; 3) concerning L2 proficiency level, L2 instruction was most advantageous for advanced students’ CT developments; 4) regarding the age groups, L2 teaching contributed the most growth in CT levels for learners in the age group of 10-14 years, and 5) L2 teaching was most effective for the undergraduate students compared to other educational levels. The findings can be beneficial for pursuing the next moves in L2 research, education, and planning educational policies in Iran.

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Background: Human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common causes of sexually transmitted disease (STD) in humans. HPV is associated with gynecologic malignancy and cervical cancer among women worldwide. In the current study we sought to determine the prevalence rate of HPV in Iranian women identified with cervical infections.
Materials and Methods:  Prevalence rate of HPV in Iran was investigated from 2000-2016 using several databases including Medline, Web of Science, Embase, Google Scholar, Iranmedex, and Scientific Information Database. Statistical analysis was performed by Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (V2.2, Biostat) software. Random effects models were used by taking into account the possibility of the heterogeneity between the studies, which was tested through the Cochran’s Q-statistic.
Results: The meta-analyses showed that the prevalence rate of HPV infections was 38.6 % (95% CI, 27.9-50.5) among Iranian women with cervical infections. The further stratified analyses indicated that the prevalence rate of HPV was higher in the studies conducted during the 2000-2008 years.
Conclusion: The results of the present study underscore the need for further enforcement of STD control strategies in Iran. Establishing advanced diagnostic facilities for HPV, vaccination of high risk groups, and continuous monitoring of HPV are recommended for HPV prevention and control.

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Denison’s Organizational Culture Model (DOCS) was used widely by academics and practitioners today.  However we included thepapershas published in Iranian journals that was published in several Iranian universities in a systematic review and results of a meta-analysis suggested that all cultures’ traits; involvement, Consistency, adaptability, and mission have similar measures. We found some methodological errors in the Denison and Mishra (1995) paper. First of all the correlation test wasn’t suite statistical test to compare the four traits of organizational cultures. And finally the five point Likertmeasurement in not good enough to measure the traits of organizational cultures. We should be concerned about the relation between organizational effectiveness and four traits of organizational cultures based on these methodological errors.

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Backgrounds: Infection is one of the major threats to liver transplant patients and significantly affects associated mortality and morbidity. Serious infections are likely to occur a few months after transplantation, and most of them are bacterial. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia in liver transplant patients.
Materials & Methods: In this systematic review and meta-analysis, Preferred Reporting Items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis guidelines were used. International databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Sciences, Embase, and Cochrane were searched by related MeSH terms and keywords for studies published until July 26, 2020. The current study was registered by a pre-defined protocol in PROSPRO.
Findings: After a comprehensive literature search, 11 articles were selected for inclusion in the analysis. The prevalence of MRSA in liver transplant patients was 75% (95% CI: 58% - 89%); however, an evident heterogeneity was observed between the studies (I²= 87.84%, p< .001).
Conclusion: In conclusion, this study results demonstrate that the prevalence of post-transplant MRSA colonization bacteremia is high among liver transplant patients. This should be considered seriously, and efforts should be made to prevent mortality in this group of patients.
 

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 One of the recent developments in the teaching of writing to second language learners is the genre-based approach which follows the more traditional product- and process-based approaches.   Experimental and quasi-experimental studies on the effects of genre-based instruction (GBI) on writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) have been frequently reported in the last few decades. Findings of these studies are inconclusive and inconsistent. Past research indicates that different populations of language learners may benefit differently from this type of instruction. The present meta-analytic study followed two purposes: a) to explore the average effect of GBI on EFL writing based on both experimental and quasi-experimental studies of the past 26 years and b) to investigate how the variables of writing task type, educational level, and first language possibly moderate the effect of GBI on EFL writing. Four research questions were addressed: a) what is the average effect size of studies on GBI in EFL writing? b) Do EFL writers at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels benefit differently from GBI? C) Does GBI affect different task differently?, and d) Do speakers of different mother tongues benefit differently from GBI? In this meta-analysis, a total number of 255 studies thoroughly searched and collected from various academic websites constituted the original population of studies intended for analysis. Based on careful exclusion and inclusion criteria, 26 (quasi)experimental studies providing 28 effect sizes were included as the final sample. The studies were coded for effect size data and moderator variable indices. The analyses were performed using CMA software. The results of the analyses showed that (1) GBI has a small average effect on EFL writing (Cohen’s d= 0.298); (2) GBI significantly more effective for primary level participants; (3) GBI produced different effects for different task types producing significantly higher effects for paragraph writing, (4) GBI was significantly more effective for learners whose first language was Japanese. The findings of this study can be considered as beneficial issue for both pedagogical and research purposes. The results imply that EFL writing instructors should consider possible moderating variables when choosing their method of writing instruction.

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Backgrounds: Reinfection among COVID-19 patients is still a challenging issue in the medical literature. Therefore, the current meta-analysis was conducted to estimate the pooled incidence rate of reinfection among COVID-19 patients.
Materials & Methods: A comprehensive search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus databases from July 1 to October 1, 2021. Original studies which estimated the incidence rate of COVID-19 reinfection were included. CASP (Critical Appraisal skills program) was used to assess the quality of studies. Data were analyzed by STATA statistical software Version 15 (StataCorp, College Station, TX, USA).
Findings: A total of 3803 articles were found, of which 16 articles remained after title, abstract, and full text screening. The minimum and maximum incidence rates of reinfection were 0.001 and 0.73%, respectively. The pooled estimated incidence rate of COVID-19 reinfection was 0.11% (95% confidence interval: 0.02-0.20, p< .001, I² = 100.0). The highest pooled estimated incidence rate of reinfection was observed in people <50 years old (0.14%) (95% CI: 0.001-0.34, p<.001, I² = 100). Regarding the time elapsed after the first infection, the highest reinfection rate occurred four months after the first infection (0.12%) (95% CI: 0.001-0.27, p< .001, I² = 100).
Conclusion: The incidence rate of reinfection among COVID-19 patients is expected to be high. However, it seems that the influence of factors including the age of patients and the time elapsed after the first infection must be considered.

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In recent years, the term "customer relationship management" has attracted much attention in the field of marketing and commerce. This study aimed to an analysis of the effect of customer relationship management dimensions on its success in service organizations with a meta-analysis approach. For this purpose, from 62 studies (from 2014 to 2018), 18 methodological and research objectives were accepted and meta-analysis was carried out on them. The research tool was a meta-analytic checklist. The findings showed that the propagation bias in the analyzed analysis is intangible. Also, the size of the impact of customer relationship management dimensions on the success of customer relationship management in service organizations was found to be 0.59 (Sig: 0/001). Accordingly, customer orientation (with an influence size of 0.601) and customer satisfaction (with a dependence size of 0.65) had the greatest impact on customer relationship management. The effect size according to Cohen's table is too high. We conclude that businesses are based on customer orientation and customer satisfaction so that the development and provision of services without considering this principle is not only difficult but impossible. Therefore, service organizations should focus all their activities and capabilities on customer satisfaction, because customers are the only source of return on investment. However, competitive markets today require all organizations to be customer-oriented.

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This meta-analysis study aimed to explore the effectiveness of Strategy-Based Teaching (SBT) in ELT (English Language Teaching). A total of 18 original studies (2000–2020), with 1834 participants of diverse learning and teaching contexts, conformed with the inclusion/ exclusion criteria, were employed to be analyzed in this study. To provide a comprehensive picture of the possible moderating factors, we included 21 moderators under three moderating sets. The impact of methodological criteria, such as eligibility revisions and substitution of alternative ranges of values for arbitrary or unclear decisions, was examined using sensitivity analyses. The findings revealed an overall significant, positive and medium effect of SBT on English learners’ outcomes for both fixed (g = 0.65) and random (g = 62) models. Moreover, meta-regression analysis results of moderating factors showed that the place, type, and design of the study had no significant predicting effect on SBT. It has been documented that the results of moderator analysis of language skills and components were also not significant. However, the results for moderating effect of language measurement instruments were found to be significant. Studies that employed standardized tests for language learning measurement revealed significantly higher mean effect size in comparison with those that used teachers’ assessments. Overall, SBT was found to be positively effective within a variety of teaching and learning contexts in ELT.

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Considering one of the earliest calls for applying pragmatics in the second language, Kasper and Rose’s (2002) study “Is Pragmatic Teachable?”, pragmatic features have been analyzed during the last 20 years in EFL/ESL contexts. The amalgamation of studies has been conducted on many speech acts around the world within the two decades, among which request, apology, and refusal are considered as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. The purpose of the present paper is to unravel the overall effectiveness of the intervention on the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal in an Iranian EFL context. To this aim, out of a total number of 80 studies, 57 papers were chosen based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, which were coded for the analysis. The results of the study revealed that the instruction of request, apology, and refusal is effective and generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications and suggestions for future studies.   
It is about four decades that pragmatics has been at the center of constant theoretical and empirical attention among the theoretician and practitioners around the world (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021). In order to appropriately construct and reconstruct the meaning of spoken and written utterances, speakers need to have shared background knowledge. Hence, it may be a burden for a person to convey what she/he intends to communicate in a way that enables the interlocutors to find out it in the way that it was intended.
In a nutshell, teaching and assessing pragmatics are justified on the ground that language learners may encounter difficulties to produce and comprehend language appropriately due to cross-cultural mismatches regarding the linguistic and social appropriacy of target language norms, and negative pragmatic transfer from their L1 to L2, to just name a few (Shakki et al., 2021). More importantly, among those studies which have investigated pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan, 2014; Derakhshan & Arabmofrad, 2018; Derakhshan & Eslami Rasekh, 2015, 2020; Derakhshan & Shakki, 2020a; Derakhshan et al., 2020; Jeon & Kaya, 2006; Kasper & Rose, 1999, 2002; Kasper & Roever, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Alcón-Soler, 2005; Plonsky & Zhuang, 2019), none of them thoroughly synthesized the empirical studies on pragmatics to find the lacuna regarding teachability of the pragmatics.
The amalgamation of mentioned studies has been conducted on many speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal are recognized as the most-appreciated speech acts in Iran. Due to the lack of adequate meta-analyses on the effectiveness of L2 pragmatic instruction (Derakhshan & Shakki, 2021; Shakki et al., 2021), which is under-researched in an Iranian EFL context, this study aimed to meta-analyze the body of research in L2 pragmatic instruction to check its effectiveness. Considering the substantial prominence of ILP in learning and teaching in EFL contexts, the purpose of the present study, as far as meta-analysis is concerned, is to summarize the magnitude and directions of the effects obtained in a series of empirical studies. The aim is to identify the effectiveness of teaching methods in the instruction of pragmatics in an Iranian context.
Apology, request, and refusal are the speech acts that were investigated in the present study. More specifically, the present study was an attempt to pursue the effectiveness of teaching L2 pragmatics, particularly the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal to EFL learners in an EFL context like Iran.  Following a comprehensive search, 80 studies were found to be coded based on the inclusion/exclusion criteria, and in the aggregate, 98 effect sizes reported from the 57 original studies generated a mean of (g = 1.43) which is significant, reflecting a quite large gain of instruction.
Despite the fact that this study may divulge several findings and implications in the field of teaching, and learning of pragmatics, like any other study undertaken so far, the present study is not exempt from limitations as well as delimitations which are enumerated as follows: One limitation is the lack of transparency and subjectivity inherent in this approach. Various reviewers might use different criteria to decide which studies should be included in their review, they may come to contradictory results and opposite conclusions. The second limitation is that the process of the analysis becomes hard and eventually untenable as the number of studies increases whereas a reviewer may be able to synthesize data from a few studies in his/her head. Some of the important studies may be ignored during the data collection, and it can be considered as another limitation. A common limitation of meta-analysis is that researchers combine different sorts of studies (apples and oranges) in the same analysis, so it leads to the argument that the summary effect will ignore possibly important differences across studies. There are still some unpublished studies lying dormant in the researchers’ filing cabinets contributing to the use of the term file drawer problem for meta-analysis which were not included in the current study.
The first delimitation refers to those dimensions of pragmatics that were not included in this investigation. Since pragmatic knowledge includes many more dimensions in each component like speech acts, politeness principles, deixis, conversational structure, presupposition, implicatures, routines, and so on. The present study tried to include the most influential components in ILP which are speech acts, among which request, apology, and refusal were selected to be investigated in this study. Though there appears to be a large amount of research in ILP, the studies which were published between 2000 and early 2020 were included in the present study. One conspicuous delimitation is the number of studies in which instruction was employed and the ones which do not implement instruction were removed from the study. The primary subcategories based on which the current study was conducted can also be extended and other moderator variables can be scrutinized.
Conducting this study brings some implications and suggestions for the researchers whose area of interest is L2 pragmatics. The results may have pivotal pedagogical implications for L2 pragmatics and future research. One of the tremendous implications of this study is that while searching for the speech acts, surprisingly, there were some speech acts that have received no attention such as congratulations, condolences, threats, and challenges, so the researchers may use these untouched areas of English pragmatic instruction for their future studies. The other implication is that the teachers would be able to utilize the most effective treatment types, which led to better performance, comprehension, and production, and they also should take care of other factors such as gender, age, and proficiency level of the learners to have better outcomes. The findings of the present study may be useful for researchers whose area of interest is pragmatics, particularly the speech acts to check the moderator variables which are helpful and predictor in teaching the speech act of request, apology, and refusal.
 

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In recent decades, information technology, especially with all aspects of our life and professional career has been stirred. Because IT applications in different fields and the rapid growth of computers in organizations, to review the level of acceptance and rejection of information technology in organizations have special significance. Hand with the growth of research in various fields related to the IT acceptance and dealing with a scattering of information and information explosion, control over all aspects of this area is largely impossible. Therefore, the combination of research studies conducted in this matter to extract the systematic and scientific results for researchers is very important. In this study using meta-analysis methods with comprehensive meta-analysis (CMA) software, for examining a large number of theses, articles and researches done in connection with the adoption of information technology in Iran, 19 studies with 21 hypotheses and variables have been selected. The results of meta-analysis shows that employee empowerment, extent of use of technology, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of IT had the most influence on the acceptance of information technology in the Iranians organizations.

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Performance assessment is one of the activities, which has many advantages and can have a considerable effect on the performance of organizations. Inadequate accountability of senior managers of marketing in recent years has incurred a loss to the position of marketing unit. As a result, studying the effect of marketing activities on organizational performance is specifically important. Framework of marketing productivity shows that it is possible to establish a relation between marketing activities and organizational performance. On the other hand, results of studies in many academic fields conducted about a specific issue are usually confusing and contrasting. Meta-analysis is a research approach that helps the researcher to a large extent to identify the moderating variables in the results of previous studies. Despite that various researches have been conducted, such contrast is also observed in the relation between marketing activities and organizational performance. Characteristics of the research sample can be referred among the several reasons that have been mentioned for such divergence in similar studies. It was tried in the present survey to identify the role of moderating variables the regarding characteristics of the research sample in relation   between marketing activities and organizational performance using meta-analysis approach. Given to the use of meta-analysis approach in the present paper, the statistical population consisted of all previous studies, which have explained and measured the relationship among marketing activities and organizational performance, and the researcher had access to them. On the basis of searching in the mentioned databases, 523 studies were gathered. With regard to the meta-analysis standards and the researcher constraints, ultimately 142 studies were selected to implement the mete–analysis method. The obtained results revealed that the moderating variables related to the characteristics of the research sample like the kind of industry, type of ownership of the organization and so on have led to a significant difference in the results of studies regarding the effect of marketing activities on the organizational performance of organizations.         

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Objectives: Although several studies have examined the association between gene polymorphism GNB3 and endurance exercise, the results are inconsistent. This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to summarize the relationship between GNB3 C825T polymorphism and endurance exercise performance. Methods: We searched all studies published until January31, 2015 in databases PubMed, Google Scholar, Embase, Medline, Science Direct and SID. From ten studies of gene polymorphisms GNB3 and endurance exercise, we selected three studies for the meta-analysis. Results: No significant association existed between GNB3 polymorphism and endurance exercise in the T versus C allelic model (OR: 1.127; 95% CI: 0.877, 1.448; P=0.349),TT versus CC additive model (OR: 1.316; 95% CI: 0.900, 1.924; P=0.157), TT + CT versus CC dominant model (OR: 1.098; 95% CI: 0.856, 1.408; P=0.464), and the TT versus CT + CC recessive model (OR: 0.520; 95% CI: 0.520, 1.111; P=0.157). Conclusion: The results showed that the GNB3 gene polymorphism was not associated with improving the performance of elite athletes in endurance sports. However, further studies would be needed in different ethnicities.

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Today communication and access to a variety of communication channels, has forced organizations to provide new and efficient services. In the meantime, banks are one of the organizations that have the largest share in the countrychr('39')s economy, so the managers of successful organizations should try to identify the factors affecting the adoption of electronic banking technology. In this research, with a different approach, meta-analysis approach, the factors affecting the adoption of electronic banking technology have been investigated. The statistical population of the study includes all domestic and foreign studies conducted up to the end of 2017 that have examined the factors affecting the adoption of electronic banking technology. The total number of studies and researches collected included 145 studies. According to the standards of meta-analysis approach, 17 studies were excluded and a total of 128 studies were selected. The results showed that technology factors have a positive and significant effect on perceived usefulness, willingness to use technology and use of technology, as well as organizational and social factors on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude towards technology, willingness to use It has a positive and significant effect on technology and the use of technology, and individual factors have a positive and significant effect on perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, attitude toward technology, and the use of technology. The effect of technology factor variables on perceived ease of use, attitudes toward technology, as well as individual factors on the willingness to use technology was not confirmed.

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