The furore of methodological activity reflects the clinical importance of meta-analysis and its potential to provide conclusive answers, rather than incremental knowledge contributions, much more cheaply than a new large Randomised Clinical Trial (RCT). Meta-analysis (MA), the methodologies of synthesising existing evidence to answer a clinical or other research question, is a relatively young and dynamic area of research. No additional external funding received for this study.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: EK was partly supported by a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) School for Primary Care Research fellowship in primary health care. Received: FebruAccepted: JPublished: July 26, 2013Ĭopyright: © 2013 Kontopantelis et al. PLoS ONE 8(7):Įditor: Tim Friede, University Medical Center Göttingen, Germany Rates were much lower where the original analysis did not detect heterogeneity or took it into account, between 1% and 3%.Ĭitation: Kontopantelis E, Springate DA, Reeves D (2013) A Re-Analysis of the Cochrane Library Data: The Dangers of Unobserved Heterogeneity in Meta-Analyses. Re-analysing all meta-analyses with this new method we found that in cases where heterogeneity had originally been detected but ignored, 17–20% of the statistical conclusions changed. A bootstrapped version of the DerSimonian-Laird approach performed best in both detecting heterogeneity and in returning more accurate overall effect estimates. Levels of unobserved heterogeneity in the Cochrane data appeared to be high, especially for small meta-analyses. We re-analysed all meta-analyses using all methods and assessed the sensitivity of the statistical conclusions. The prevalence of a zero heterogeneity estimate in the simulated scenarios was compared with that in the Cochrane data, to estimate the degree of unobserved heterogeneity in the latter. Using simulated data we assessed the performance of various meta-analysis methods in different scenarios. We accessed 57,397 meta-analyses, available in the Cochrane Library in August 2012.
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