EDITORIAL
Research methods
Systematic reviews of meta-analyses: applications and limitations
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor M Delgado-Rodríguez
Division of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, University of Jaen, 23071-Jaen, Spain; mdelgado@ujaen.es
Systematic reviews of meta-analysis can provide helpful insights in several aspects of meta-analysis: quality of published meta-analyses, statistical methods, publication bias and its determinants, and on the causes of heterogeneity. However, they present limitations, mostly derived from the current statistical procedures applied to detect some facts, such as publication bias and heterogeneity.
Keywords: meta-analysis; systematic review
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Systematic review of meta-analyses can be defined as the study working with meta-analysis as the unit of analysis. During the past years meta-analysis has been a growing field, more and more papers appearing on it with time. For instance, the number of references in a PubMed search using the keyword meta-analysis has steadily increased: 329 in 1990, 769 in 1995, 1649 in 2000, and 2545 in 2004. With such amount of papers it is not strange that the number of papers using meta-analysis itself as unit of analysis has also increased. From time to time the term "meta-meta-analysis" has appeared in scientific literature. The first time I read it in epidemiological literature was in an excellent editorial by Spitzer1 criticising the limitations of pooling data from observational studies. To follow properly the terminology currently applied the term meta-meta-analysis should be reserved for the combination of several meta-analyses in
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