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Abstract
Objectives
To evaluate how well meta-analysis mean estimators represent reported medical research and establish which meta-analysis method is better using widely accepted model selection measures: Akaike information criterion (AIC) and Bayesian information criterion (BIC).
Study Design and SettingWe compiled 67,308 meta-analyses from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) published between 1997 and 2020, collectively encompassing nearly 600,000 medical findings. We compared unrestricted weighted least squares (UWLS) vs. random effects (RE); fixed effect was also secondarily considered.
ResultsThe probability that a randomly selected systematic review from the CDSR would favor UWLS over RE is 79.4% (95% confidence interval [CI
UWLS frequently dominates RE in medical research, often substantially. Thus, the UWLS should be reported routinely in the meta-analysis of clinical trials.
Details
; Maier, Maximilian 3 ; Doucouliagos, Hristos 1
; Otte, Willem M 4 ; Bartoš, František 5 1 Department of Economics, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia; Deakin Laboratory for the Meta-Analysis of Research (DeLMAR), Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
2 Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Stanford Prevention Research Center, Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA; Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA; Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA; Department of Statistics, Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford, CA, USA
3 Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom
4 Department of Pediatric Neurology, UMC Utrecht Brain Center, University Medical Center Utrecht, and Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
5 Department of Psychological Methods, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands