Testing small study effects in multivariate meta‐analysis

DOI10.1111/BIOM.13342zbMATH Open1520.62227arXiv1805.09876OpenAlexW3046143956WikidataQ98154189 ScholiaQ98154189MaRDI QIDQ6047762FDOQ6047762

Authors: Chuan Hong, Georgia Salanti, Sally C. Morton, Richard D. Riley Riley, Haitao Chu, Stephen E. Kimmel, Yong Chen 

Publication date: 9 October 2023

Published in: Biometrics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Small study effects occur when smaller studies show different, often larger, treatment effects than large ones, which may threaten the validity of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The most well-known reasons for small study effects include publication bias, outcome reporting bias and clinical heterogeneity. Methods to account for small study effects in univariate meta-analysis have been extensively studied. However, detecting small study effects in a multivariate meta-analysis setting remains an untouched research area. One of the complications is that different types of selection processes can be involved in the reporting of multivariate outcomes. For example, some studies may be completely unpublished while others may selectively report multiple outcomes. In this paper, we propose a score test as an overall test of small study effects in multivariate meta-analysis. Two detailed case studies are given to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed test over various naive applications of univariate tests in practice. Through simulation studies, the proposed test is found to retain nominal Type I error with considerable power in moderate sample size settings. Finally, we also evaluate the concordance between the proposed test with the naive application of univariate tests by evaluating 44 systematic reviews with multiple outcomes from the Cochrane Database.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.09876

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zbMATH Keywords

composite likelihoodpublication biassystematic reviewoutcome reporting biascomparative effectiveness researchsmall study effect

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10)

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Cited In (6)

• Discussion on ‘Testing small study effects in multivariate meta‐analysis’ by Chuan Hong, Georgia Salanti, Sally Morton, Richard Riley, Haitao Chu, Stephen E Kimmel and Yong Chen
• Small-study effects: current practice and challenges for future research
• A Bayesian hierarchical model for individual participant data meta-analysis of demand curves
• Accounting for publication bias using a bivariate trim and fill meta-analysis procedure
• PALM: patient-centered treatment ranking via large-scale multivariate network meta-analysis
• Detecting and adjusting for small‐study effects in meta‐analysis

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