- "A meta-analysis is a statistical analysis that combines the results of multiple scientific studies." - "The aim then is to use approaches from statistics to derive a pooled estimate closest to the unknown common truth based on how this error is perceived."
Statistical methods for combining results from different studies.
- "Meta-analytic results are considered the most trustworthy source of evidence by the evidence-based medicine literature."
- "It also has the capacity to contrast results from different studies and identify patterns among study results, sources of disagreement among those results, or other interesting relationships that may come to light with multiple studies."
- "If individual studies are systematically biased due to questionable research practices or the publication bias at the journal level, the meta-analytic estimate of the overall treatment effect may not reflect the actual efficacy of a treatment." - "Meta-analysis has also been criticized for averaging differences among heterogeneous studies because these differences could potentially inform clinical decisions."
- "This makes meta-analysis malleable in the sense that these methodological choices made in completing a meta-analysis are not determined but may affect the results."
- "Deciding how to search for studies, selecting studies based on a set of objective criteria, dealing with incomplete data, analyzing the data, and accounting for or choosing not to account for publication bias."
- "Meta-analyses are often, but not always, important components of a systematic review procedure."
- "For instance, a meta-analysis may be conducted on several clinical trials of a medical treatment, in an effort to obtain a better understanding of how well the treatment works."
- "Here it is convenient to follow the terminology used by the Cochrane Collaboration, and use 'meta-analysis' to refer to statistical methods of combining evidence, leaving other aspects of 'research synthesis' or 'evidence synthesis', such as combining information from qualitative studies, for the more general context of systematic reviews."
- "Meta-analysis may also be applied to a single study in cases where there are many cohorts which have not gone through identical selection criteria or to which the same investigational methodologies have not been applied to all in the same manner or under the same exacting conditions." Note: Due to the limitations of the AI model, the output may not include the exact quotes from the given paragraph. The provided responses are generated based on the understanding of the paragraph by the model.