To assess the methodology of meta-analyses published in leading general and specialist medical journals over a 10-year period.
I have written at length about the methodology of meta-analysis as applied to econometric studies [15, 16], and have used meta-analysis for a number of different data sets, including several meta-regression analyses of alcohol effects (e.g., [7, 17, 18]).
The methodology of meta-analysis is well developed and is continuously being refined to address identified threats of bias.
Our study tries to address this problem using the standard methodology of meta-analysis, and formally assessing the presence and sources of heterogeneity in the results of the available studies.
The methodology of meta-analysis is presented in Table 2. Meta-analyses, typically applied to the results of randomized clinical trials, also increasingly address the findings of observational clinical studies [ 18].
In this article, we review the methodology for meta-analysis of sex-specific genome-wide association studies, and propose a sex-differentiated test of association with quantitative or dichotomous traits, which allows for heterogeneity of allelic effects between males and females.
Section 3 serves as a short introduction to the methodology of multivariate meta-analysis.
The methodology of network meta-analysis has developed quickly and continues to be refined using both Bayesian and frequentist approaches.
18 IPD meta-analyses are still quite rare in the field of complex interventions, 37 39 even though the literature on the methodology of IPD meta-analyses is increasing.
3 MBMA is distinguished from the methodology of conventional meta-analysis by the manner in which it incorporates longitudinal and/or dose response data.
As this work has in part already been performed [ 30, 31, 36, 37, 40, 43- 47] this will be a repeat of previous work, in which subtle adjustments to the methodology of previous meta-analyses will be made.
