title: Big and disparate data: considerations for pediatric consortia.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Increasingly, there is a need for examining exposure disease associations in large, diverse datasets to understand the complex determinants of pediatric disease and disability. Recognizing that children's health research consortia will be important sources of big data, it is crucial for the pediatric research community to be knowledgeable about the challenges and opportunities that they will face. The present review will provide examples of existing children's health consortia, highlight recent pooled analyses conducted by children's health research consortia, address common challenges of pooled analyses, and provide recommendations to advance collective research efforts in pediatric research.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Formal consortia and other collective-science initiatives are increasingly being created to share individual data from a set of relevant epidemiological studies to address a common research topic under the concept that the joint effort of many individual groups can accomplish far more than working alone. There are practical challenges to the participation of investigators within consortia that need to be addressed in order for them to work.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Researchers who access consortia with data centers will be able to go far beyond their initial hypotheses and potentially accomplish research that was previously thought infeasible or too costly.
authors.affiliation: aIcahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY bRenssealear Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA.
authors.forename: Jeanette A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Stingone
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Mervish
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kovatch
authors.forename: Deborah L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: McGuinness
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Gennings
authors.forename: Susan L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Teitelbaum
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D000067576:Child Health; D003140:Communicable Disease Control / Q000379:methods; D019033:Delivery of Health Care, Integrated / Q000458:organization & administration*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008297:Male; D010372:Pediatrics; D014481:United States