Introduction to Meta Analysis
School of Health Sciences, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Canterbury, New Zealand
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Evidence Based Medicine, Public Health, Statistics
- Keywords
- meta analysis, systematic review
- Copyright
- © 2014 Basu
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Introduction to Meta Analysis. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e665v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.665v1
Abstract
Meta analysis refers to secondary data analysis where information from individual research articles are synthesised to arrive at a summary estimate. Meta analysis thus refers to several related steps of framing a question or a problem, formulating search strategies, collection of journal articles or primary studies, abstraction of data from the studies, critical appraisal of studies, judging homogeneity of studies, and synthesis of information from them. In this paper, we describe the key processes of how to conduct each of these steps to conduct a meta analysis.
Author Comment
This paper is a book chapter submitted for a book on research methods to be published next year (2015).
