Meta Analysis Book Chapter

Arin Basu
University of Canterbury
September 23, 2014
Title: metaanalysisbookchapter AB Author: Arindam Bose Base Header
Level: 1

0.1

Summary

The purpose of this article is to introduce you to the principles of met analysis.
Meta analysis refers to an analytical strategy of secondary data analysis
where diverse results from diffrent studies are pooled together to arrive at a
summary estimate. In this sense, meta analysis is similar to systematic review,
where as well, studies are identified following a specific formulation of question,
and studies are critically appraised and the findings are summarized.

0.2

What is Meta Analysis?

0.3

Steps of Meta Analysis

0.4

Framing of Research Qeustion

Searching he Literature
First Pass by Title and Abstract
Obtain Full texts of articles
Conduct Hand Search
Appraise critically for risk of bias
Find out if the articles show homogeneity of variation
Pool the results of the studies (fixed effects or randome effects)
Conduct sensitivity analyses

Framing of Research Question

The study questions are framed using the participant-intervention-comparatoroutcomes (PICO) format. In the PICO format, the participants refer to individuals who take part in the study (thus self explanatory), the term intervention
refer to the specific experiment or the drugs or devices that are done to the those
who take part in the study, the comparator groups specifically refer to those individuals who were on the placebo arm or the usual care arm for the study, and
1

the outcomes refer to the specific outcomes that a researcher is interested to

study in the meta analysis.
This scheme allows for some variations. In meta analyses of observational
studies, instead of intervention, researchers study natural experiments, also
known as exposure, so the PICO framework then gets converted into PECO
framework [1].

References
[1] D Moher, A Liberati, and DG Altman. Preferred Reporting Format for
Systematic. PLoS Med, 2009.