391,955 papers found

This correspondence addresses critical methodological limitations in the recent meta analysis by Hu et al. regarding meteorological conditions and rheumatoid arthritis (RA). We highlight issues of clinical heterogeneity arising from the conflation of disparate outcomes and inconsistent follow-up durations. Furthermore,…

The number of systematic reviews and meta-analyses submitted to nursing and allied health journals continues to grow. Well-conducted and reported syntheses of research are valuable to advancing science. One of the common critiques identified in these manuscripts involves how the authors addressed heterogeneity among th…

Systematic reviews and meta-analysis seek to answer a pre-framed research question to lead to a valid answer through a systematic, explicit and reproducible method of locating; identifying, including and appraising appropriate trials. The results are synthesized considering the methodological rigor of included trials.…

This issue of Research Synthesis Methods is devoted to discussion of the origins of modern meta-analysis. Three articles by pioneers in development meta-analysis are by Gene Glass, Frank Schmidt, and Robert Rosenthal, respectively. They reflect on their own experiences about how they made these developments. The fourth…

Meta-analysis (forest) plots are widely used to show the results from multiple individual randomized trials or observational studies that address the same question, including the assessment of screening markers. They show the between study spread of results and provide a summary estimate of the results from all the stu…

In the practice of data analysis, there is a conceptual distinction between hypothesis testing, on the one hand, and estimation with quantified uncertainty on the other. Among frequentists in psychology, a shift of emphasis from hypothesis testing to estimation has been dubbed "the New Statistics" (Cumming 2014). A sec…

This chapter contains a methodological framework for choosing a model for the meta-analysis of very few studies and selecting an estimation method for the chosen model by means of study characteristics and by comparing results yielded by different approaches. When the results are inconclusive between different estimati…

Meta-analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) are 2 of the most prominent statistical techniques employed in the behavioral, medical, and social sciences. They each have their own well-established research communities, terminologies, statistical models, software packages, and journals (Research Synthesis Methods…

Component network meta-analysis (CNMA) compares treatments comprising multiple components and estimates the effects of individual components. For network meta-analysis, a standard network plot with nodes for treatments and edges for direct comparisons between treatments is drawn to visualize the evidence structure and…

Network meta-analysis is a technique for comparing multiple treatments simultaneously in a single analysis by combining direct and indirect evidence within a network of randomized controlled trials. Network meta-analysis may assist assessing the comparative effectiveness of different treatments regularly used in clinic…