Abstract
Meta-analysis is the statistical method for synthesizing studies on the same topic and is often used in clinical psychology to quantify the efficacy of treatments. A major threat to the validity of meta-analysis is publication bias, which implies that some studies are less likely to be published and are therefore less often included in a meta-analysis. A consequence of publication bias is the overestimation of the meta-analytic effect size that may give a false impression with respect to the efficacy of a treatment, which might result in (avoidable) suffering of patients and waste of resources. Guidelines recommend to routinely assess publication bias in meta-analyses, but this is currently not common practice. This chapter describes popular and state-of-the-art methods to assess publication bias in a meta-analysis and summarizes recommendations for applying these methods. We also illustrate how these methods can be applied to two meta-analyses that are typical for clinical psychology such that psychologists can readily apply the methods in their own meta-analyses.
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Notes
- 1.
A vector is R terminology for a particular data structure that contains in our case seven numeric values with the studies’ standardized mean difference (yi) and corresponding sampling variance (vi).
- 2.
The funnel plot based on the data of the meta-analysis by Archer et al. (2012) is available in the annotated R codes (https://osf.io/qjk9b/)
- 3.
The study’s mean, sample size, and standard deviation of both groups are available on page 73 of Cowlishaw et al. (2012).
- 4.
Statistical power of the studies is computed using the estimate of the fixed-effect model as proxy for the true effect size and a two-tailed hypothesis with significance level 0.05 (Stanley et al., 2017).
- 5.
Moderate heterogeneity is defined in terms of the I2-statistic that is commonly used in meta-analysis to quantify the heterogeneity. The I2-statistic (Higgins & Thompson, 2002) indicates the proportion of total variance that can be attributed to heterogeneity in true effect size. Moderate heterogeneity is I2 = 0.5 according to the rules-of-thumb proposed in Higgins et al. (2003).
- 6.
Research is currently ongoing to study whether this assumption can be relaxed by not only weighing statistically significant and nonsignificant studies differently in p-uniform* but also allow more complex weighting schemes. For example, marginally significant studies (i.e., studies with p-values just above the significance threshold) may have a different probability of being published than other nonsignificant studies. Weighing these studies differently may improve estimation and drawing inferences.
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Author Note
We would like to thank Claudia Kapp, Manuel Heinrich, and Johannes Heekerens for commenting on a previous version of this chapter.
The authors made the following contributions. Robbie C.M. van Aert: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing—Original Draft Preparation, Writing—Review & Editing; Helen Niemeyer: Conceptualization, Writing—Review & Editing.
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van Aert, R.C.M., Niemeyer, H. (2022). Publication Bias. In: O'Donohue, W., Masuda, A., Lilienfeld, S. (eds) Avoiding Questionable Research Practices in Applied Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04968-2_10
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