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According to Davey et al. (2011) with a total of 22,453 meta-analyses from the January 2008 Issue of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, the median number of studies included in each meta-analysis is only three. In other words, about a half or more of meta-analyses conducted in the literature include only two or three studies. While the common-effect model (also referred to as the fixed-effect model) may lead to misleading results when the heterogeneity among studies is large, the conclusions based on the random-effects model may also be unreliable when the number of studies is small. Alternatively, the fixed-effects model avoids the restrictive assumption in the common-effect model and the need to estimate the between-study variance in the random-effects model. We note, however, that the fixed-effects model is under appreciated and rarely used in practice until recently. In this paper, we compare all three models and demonstrate the usefulness of the fixed-effects model when the number of studies is small. In addition, we propose a new estimator for the unweighted average effect in the fixed-effects model. Simulations and real examples are also used to illustrate the benefits of the fixed-effects model and the new estimator.
Objective Bayesian inference procedures are derived for the parameters of the multivariate random effects model generalized to elliptically contoured distributions. The posterior for the overall mean vector and the between-study covariance matrix is
In this paper, we propose a varying coefficient panel data model with unobservable multiple interactive fixed effects that are correlated with the regressors. We approximate each coefficient function by B-spline, and propose a robust nonlinear iterat
In meta-analyses, publication bias is a well-known, important and challenging issue because the validity of the results from a meta-analysis is threatened if the sample of studies retrieved for review is biased. One popular method to deal with public
In a network meta-analysis, some of the collected studies may deviate markedly from the others, for example having very unusual effect sizes. These deviating studies can be regarded as outlying with respect to the rest of the network and can be influ
Network meta-analysis (NMA) allows the combination of direct and indirect evidence from a set of randomized clinical trials. Performing NMA using individual patient data (IPD) is considered as a gold standard approach as it provides several advantage