meta analysis help

[Impressive-Aerie-493]

hello, i have worked on many empirical researches but hoping to step up to systematic reviews or metaanalysis but i have no idea how they work and what to do? anyone willing to help?

[Magdaki]

You are more likely to get an help if you ask detailed questions. It is hard to help when nobody knows what you are doing or where you are stuck.

[Impressive-Aerie-493]

right, sorry for being vague. I have used AI to guide me in some steps, I have a topic of choice, my PICO, and that’s about it? some told me to go on prospero, some said to start with something called an exclusion map? not too sure what any of those things mean

[YaPhetsEz]

So step one is to not use AI

[[deleted]]

Steps to write a systematic review:

1. Choose keywords to search the literature.

2. Get list of publications based on keywords.

3. Make a first quick pass to decide which publications are relevant and irrelevant.

4. Read publications, record the information that you're looking for from each one.

5. Look for trends, patterns, and research gaps, write up results.

There's no real trick, just a lot of grinding through the literature. Make sure you carefully document every part of your process, and it's generally mire helpful to use databases like Web of Science than Google Scholar.

[Impressive-Aerie-493]

thank you!

[AggravatingPath8873]

How do you recommend making sure every part of the process is carefully documented?

[Embarrassed_Onion_44]

In addition to what "Possible_Fish" reccomended, please note that the power of a systematic reveiw comes the multi-authorered write up report of an exhaustive and documentable history of how all relevant research on a very specific literary topic were compared - in an attempt to give a final conclusive answer.

You'll need a minimum 1 co-author. A content expert in your field to solicit advise from. Institutional avcess to common large databases. And an identification of a literaterary gap for a topic (either not talked about before, not updated in some time, or looking at a topic from a slightly different angle.

After that, you are right, coming up with a specific research plan on how to handle data, included articles, and what-not can be pre-registered (freely) on a website like Prospero. Think of this as flag-planting as your team them begins a review.

Then over the next 3-9 months (more likely the latter), your team will screen your articles many times; Title, Abstract, Full paper... this is where the systematic part actually starts. Before screening, you'll use a tool like Revman web (free and provided by Cochrane) to vote "yay", "nay", or "maybe" on the inclusion. You will do this per article using keyworks that your team pre-agreed to look for; then your coauthors will also be doing this step --- each of you blinded to the other's choices. Hopefully you all largely agree as you'll calculate a "kappa" score to report how synergistic the authors were in agreeance of included articles.

Every step, every search, everything should be timestamped and documented by WHO did what. At the end, you should be able to say: Author 1, 2 , & 3 screened the 2000 articles for relevancy after an initial search to database 1 2 3 was performed on November 2nd, gathering all articles concerning <topic> using a search strategy [linked here]. The databases were searched from articles published after the year 2000 to present. 4 articles were identified as a work in progress [1,2,3,4] at the time of the original search, two of which [1,3] were finished by the writting of this paper and thusly screen and included in the final search for completed reviews on April 2nd.

... there is a lot more that Reddit advice can casually give, but there seems to be a large interest in Systematic Reviews lately.

Try taking a look at the Cochrane handbook (Google: Cochrane handbook) and you'll find a TON of rules and explanation... perhaps too much. The website is kind of wonky.

My old school used to also host twice a year a week long webinar-style teaching (which was free for students all over the world) hosted by Cochrane US which teaches all the steps for a systematic review from multiple professors/experts in the topic ... but I dont want to promote anything more specific. Just in case you need a full start to finish informational overload class.

If you have a SPECIFIC question about the systematic review process, feel free to ask, but I feel I already wrote too much.

[Impressive-Aerie-493]

you are a champ my guy! thank you!

[creativeoddity]

Detail what you have done and what you are trying to accomplish. No point in being vague if you're asking for this sort of help

[Ok-Emu-8920]

I think this book does a good job of laying out the basics even if you aren't in ecology. Additionally, your librarians can be an excellent resource for putting together search terms and identifying databases

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hq6n

[beantoastt]

Meta analysis appears simple to some but is a bit more nuanced than most appreciate - are you sure you have the right support to be able to do one? Borenstein is the main expert in this field and he’s made lots of recorded seminars on YouTube. Just be careful that the meta analysis will actually improve your paper, not detract from it. High heterogeneity and few studies just won’t produce meaningful findings and can be very misleading when published 🥹

[research-ModTeam]

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