Identification of application and interpretation errors that can occur in pairwise meta-analyses in systematic reviews of interventions: a systematic review

Resumo original em inglês

O que aconteceu

To generate a bank of items describing application and interpretation errors that can arise in pairwise meta-analyses in systematic reviews of interventions.

MEDLINE, Embase, and Scopus were searched to identify studies describing types of errors in meta-analyses. Descriptions of errors and supporting quotes were extracted by multiple authors. Errors were reviewed at team meetings to determine if they should be excluded, reworded, or combined with other errors, and were categorized into broad categories of errors and subcategories within.

O que encontraram

Fifty articles met our inclusion criteria, leading to the identification of 139 errors. We identified 25 errors covering data extraction/manipulation, 74 covering statistical analyses, and 40 covering interpretation. Many of the statistical analysis errors related to the meta-analysis model (eg, using a two-stage strategy to determine whether to select a fixed or random-effects model) and statistical heterogeneity (eg, not undertaking an assessment for statistical heterogeneity).

Por que isso importa

We generated a comprehensive bank of possible errors that can arise in the application and interpretation of meta-analyses in systematic reviews of interventions. This item bank of errors provides the foundation for developing a checklist to help peer reviewers detect statistical errors.

Resumo publicado sob licença CC BY. A tradução para o português ainda não chegou a este estudo.