This study builds on the simulation framework of a recent paper by Stanley and Doucouliagos ("Research Synthesis Methods" 2023;14;515--519). S&D use simulations to make the argument that meta-analyses using partial correlation coefficients (PCCs) should employ a "suboptimal" estimator of the PCC standard error when…

Interrupted time series (ITS) are often meta-analysed to inform public health and policy decisions but examination of the statistical methods for ITS analysis and meta-analysis in this context is limited. We simulated meta-analyses of ITS studies with continuous outcome data, analysed the studies using segmented linear regression with two…

Ideally, a meta-analysis will summarize data from several unbiased studies. Here we look into the less than ideal situation in which contributing studies may be compromised by non-differential measurement error in the exposure variable. Specifically, we consider a meta-analysis for the association between a continuous outcome variable and one or…

The most common and well-known meta-regression models work under the assumption that there is only one effect size estimate per study and that the estimates are independent. However, meta-analytic reviews of social science research often include multiple effect size estimates per primary study, leading to dependence in the estimates. Some…

During drug development, a biomarker is sometimes identified as separating a patient population into those with more and those with less benefit from evaluated treatments. Consequently, later studies might be targeted, while earlier ones are performed in mixed patient populations. This poses a challenge in evidence synthesis, especially if only…

Publication bias and other forms of outcome reporting bias are critical threats to the validity of findings from research syntheses. A variety of methods have been proposed for detecting selective outcome reporting in a collection of effect size estimates, including several methods based on assessment of asymmetry of funnel plots, such as the…

In meta-analytic studies, there are often multiple moderators available (eg, study characteristics). In such cases, traditional meta-analysis methods often lack sufficient power to investigate interaction effects between moderators, especially high-order interactions. To overcome this problem, meta-CART was proposed: an approach that applies…

Synthesizing findings about the indirect (mediated) effect plays an important role in determining the mechanism through which variables affect one another. This simulation study compared six methods for synthesizing indirect effects: correlation-based MASEM, parameter-based MASEM, marginal likelihood synthesis, an adjustment to marginal likelihood…

This paper studies the performance of the FAT-PET-PEESE (FPP) procedure, a commonly employed approach for addressing publication bias in the economics and business meta-analysis literature. The FPP procedure is generally used for 3 purposes: (1) to test whether a sample of estimates suffers from publication bias, (2) to test whether the estimates…

The purpose of this study is to show how Monte Carlo analysis of meta-analytic estimators can be used to select estimators for specific research situations. Our analysis conducts 1620 individual experiments, where each experiment is defined by a unique combination of sample size, effect size, effect size heterogeneity, publication selection…

Percentage study weights in meta-analysis reveal the contribution of each study toward the overall summary results and are especially important when some studies are considered outliers or at high risk of bias. In meta-analyses of test accuracy reviews, such as a bivariate meta-analysis of sensitivity and specificity, the percentage study weights…

The random-effects model, applied in most meta-analyses nowadays, typically assumes normality of the distribution of the effect parameters. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of various random-effects methods (standard method, Hartung's method, profile likelihood method, and bootstrapping) for computing an average effect size…

Background: Individual patient data (IPD) meta-analysis allows for the exploration of heterogeneity and can identify subgroups that most benefit from an intervention (or exposure), much more successfully than meta-analysis of aggregate data. One-stage or two-stage IPD meta-analysis is possible, with the former using mixed-effects regression models…

Objective: Various statistical methods have been developed to estimate hazard ratios (HRs) from published Kaplan-Meier (KM) curves for the purpose of performing meta-analyses. The objective of this study was to determine the reliability, accuracy, and precision of four commonly used methods by Guyot, Williamson, Parmar, and Hoyle and Henley.…

Dependent effect sizes are ubiquitous in meta-analysis. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we compared the performance of 2 methods for meta-regression with dependent effect sizes--robust variance estimation (RVE) and 3-level modeling--with the standard meta-analytic method for independent effect sizes. We further compared bias-reduced linearization…