Publication bias in meta-analyses from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews

Statistics in Medicine

Volumn 34, Issue 20, 2015, Pages 2781-2793

  Kicinski, Michal ^a   Springate, David A ^b   Kontopantelis, Evangelos ^b  

^a HASSELT UNIVERSITY   (Belgium)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Bayesian methods; Cochrane Library; Meta analysis; Publication bias; Selection model; Systematic reviews

Indexed keywords

ADVERSE OUTCOME; ALGORITHM; ARTICLE; BAYES THEOREM; CLINICAL EFFECTIVENESS; COCHRANE LIBRARY; COMPARATIVE STUDY; EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE; HUMAN; MATHEMATICAL MODEL; META ANALYSIS (TOPIC); OUTCOME ASSESSMENT; PATIENT SAFETY; PROBABILITY; PUBLICATION; PUBLISHING; SYSTEMATIC REVIEW (TOPIC); CLINICAL TRIAL (TOPIC); FACTUAL DATABASE; LITERATURE; PLACEBO EFFECT;

BAYES THEOREM; CLINICAL TRIALS AS TOPIC; DATABASES, FACTUAL; META-ANALYSIS AS TOPIC; PLACEBO EFFECT; PUBLICATION BIAS; REVIEW LITERATURE AS TOPIC;

EID: 84937736514     PISSN: 02776715     EISSN: 10970258     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1002/sim.6525     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Dickersin K. The existence of publication bias and risk factors for its occurrence. Journal of the American Medical Association 1990; 263(10):1385-1389.
2. Moreno SG, Sutton AJ, Turner EH, Abrams KR, Cooper NJ, Palmer TM, Ades AE. Novel methods to deal with publication biases: secondary analysis of antidepressant trials in the FDA trial registry database and related journal publications. British Medical Journal 2009; 339:b2981.
3. Onishi A, Furukawa TA. Publication bias is underreported in systematic reviews published in high-impact-factor journals: metaepidemiologic study. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2014; 67(12):1320-1326.
4. Turner EH, Matthews AM, Linardatos E, Tell RA, Rosenthal R. Selective publication of antidepressant trials and its influence on apparent efficacy. New England Journal of Medicine 2008; 358(3):252-260.
5. Lee K, Bacchetti P, Sim I. Publication of clinical trials supporting successful new drug applications: a literature analysis. PLoS Medicine 2008; 5(9):e191.
6. Decullier E, Lheritier V, Chapuis F. Fate of biomedical research protocols and publication bias in France: retrospective cohort study. British Medical Journal 2005; 331:19-22.
7. Dickersin K, Min YI, Meinert CL. Factors influencing publication of research results. Follow-up of applications submitted to two institutional review boards. Journal of the American Medical Association 1992; 267(3):374-378.
8. Stern JM, Simes RJ. Publication bias: evidence of delayed publication in a cohort study of clinical research projects. British Medical Journal 1997; 315(7109):640-645.
9. Chan A. Empirical evidence for selective reporting of outcomes in randomized trials: comparison of protocols to published articles. Journal of the American Medical Association 2004; 291(20):2457-2465.
10. Chan AW, Altman DG. Identifying outcome reporting bias in randomised trials on PubMed: review of publications and survey of authors. British Medical Journal 2005; 330(7494):753.
11. Rising K, Bacchetti P, Bero L. Reporting bias in drug trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration: review of publication and presentation. PLoS Medicine 2008; 5(11):e217.
12. Riveros C, Dechartres A, Perrodeau E, Haneef R, Boutron I, Ravaud P. Timing and completeness of trial results posted at ClinicalTrials.gov and published in journals. PLoS Medicine 2013; 10(12):e1001566.
13. Dwan K, Altman DG, Clarke M, Gamble C, Higgins JP, Sterne JA, Williamson PR, Kirkham JJ. Evidence for the selective reporting of analyses and discrepancies in clinical trials: a systematic review of cohort studies of clinical trials. PLoS Medicine 2014; 11(6):e1001666.
14. Ioannidis JP, Lau J. Completeness of safety reporting in randomized trials: an evaluation of 7 medical areas. Journal of the American Medical Association 2001; 285(4):437-443.
15. Hazell L, Shakir SA. Under-reporting of adverse drug reactions : a systematic review. Drug Safety 2006; 29(5):385-396.
16. Thornton A, Lee P. Publication bias in meta-analysis: its causes and consequences. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2000; 53(2):207-216.
17. Nuesch E, Trelle S, Reichenbach S, Rutjes AW, Tschannen B, Altman DG, Egger M, Juni P. Small study effects in meta-analyses of osteoarthritis trials: meta-epidemiological study. British Medical Journal 2010; 341:c3515.
18. Dechartres A, Trinquart L, Boutron I, Ravaud P. Influence of trial sample size on treatment effect estimates: meta-epidemiological study. British Medical Journal 2013; 346:f2304.
19. Zhang Z, Xu X, Ni H. Small studies may overestimate the effect sizes in critical care meta-analyses: a meta-epidemiological study. Critical Care 2013; 17(1):R2.
20. Pereira TV, Horwitz RI, Ioannidis JP. Empirical evaluation of very large treatment effects of medical interventions. Journal of the American Medical Association 2012; 308(16):1676-1684.
21. Naudet F, Millet B, Charlier P, Reymann JM, Maria AS, Falissard B. Which placebo to cure depression? A thought-provoking network meta-analysis. BMC Medicine 2013; 11:230.
22. Sterne JA, Sutton AJ, Ioannidis JP, Terrin N, Jones DR, Lau J, Carpenter J, Rücker G, Harbord RM, Schmid CH, Tetzlaff J, Deeks JJ, Peters J, Macaskill P, Schwarzer G, Duval S, Altman DG, Moher D, Higgins JP. Recommendations for examining and interpreting funnel plot asymmetry in meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials. British Medical Journal 2011; 343:d4002.
23. Sterne JAC, Gavaghan D, Egger M. Publication and related bias in meta-analysis: power of statistical tests and prevalence in the literature. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2000; 53(11):1119-1129.
24. LeLorier J, Gregoire G, Benhaddad A, Lapierre J, Derderian F. Discrepancies between meta-analyses and subsequent large randomized, controlled trials. New England Journal of Medicine 1997; 337(8):536-542.
25. Villar J, Carroli G, Belizan JM. Predictive ability of meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials. Lancet 1995; 345(8952):772-776.
26. Egger M, Smith G, Schneider M, Minder C. Bias in meta-analysis detected by a simple, graphical test. British Medical Journal 1997; 315:629-634.
27. Kicinski M. Publication bias in recent meta-analyses. PloS One 2013; 8(11):e81823.
28. Chalmers I. Underreporting research is scientific misconduct. Journal of the American Medical Association 1990; 263(10):1405-1408.
29. International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Available from: http://icmje.org/. [Accessed on 13 May 2014].
30. World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki - ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. Available from: http://www.wma.net/en/30publications/10policies/b3/17c.pdf [Accessed on 13 May 2014].
31. Ioannidis JP, Trikalinos TA. An exploratory test for an excess of significant findings. Clinical Trials 2007; 4(3):245-253.
32. Kontopantelis E, Springate DA, Reeves D. A re-analysis of the Cochrane Library data: the dangers of unobserved heterogeneity in meta-analyses. PloS One 2013; 8(7):e69930.
33. Springate DA, Kontopantelis E. Cochrane_scraper: tools for downloading data from the Cochrane Library of Systematic Reviews Version 1.1.0, 2014. Available from: https://github.com/DASpringate/Cochrane_scraper.
34. Silliman N. Hierarchical selection models with applications in meta-analysis. Journal of American Statistical Association 1997; 92(439):926-936.
35. Hedges LV, Vevea J. Selection method approaches. In Publication Bias in Meta Analysis: Prevention, Assessment, and Adjustments, Rothstein H, Sutton A, Borenstein M (eds). Willey: West Sussex, UK, 2005; 145-174.
36. Hedges L, Vevea J. Estimating effect size under publication bias: small sample properties and robustness of a random effects selection model. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 1996; 21(4):299-332.
37. Hedges L. Modeling publication selection effects in meta-analysis. Statistical Science 1992; 7(2):246-255.
38. Dear K, Begg C. An approach for assessing publication bias prior to performing a meta-analysis. Statistical Science 1992; 7(2):237-245.
39. Rufibach K. Selection models with monotone weight functions in meta analysis. Biometrical Journal 2011; 53(4):689-704.
40. Sutton AJ, Song F, Gilbody SM, Abrams KR. Modelling publication bias in meta-analysis: a review. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 2000; 9(5):421-445.
41. Crainiceanu C, Ruppert D, Wand MP. Bayesian analysis for penalized spline regression using WinBUGS. Journal of Statistical Software 2005; 14(14).
42. Ruppert D, Wand M, Carroll R. Semiparametric Regression. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2003.
43. Ruppert D. Selecting the number of knots for penalized splines. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 2002; 11(4):735-757.
44. Stan Development Team. A C++ Library for Probability and Sampling, Version 2.4, 2014. Available from: http://mc-stan.org/.
45. Begg C, Mazumdar M. Operating characteristics of a rank correlation test for publication bias. Biometrics 1994; 50(4):1088-1101.
46. Harbord RM, Egger M, Sterne JA. A modified test for small-study effects in meta-analyses of controlled trials with binary endpoints. Statistics in Medicine 2006; 25(20):3443-3457.
47. Macaskill P, Walter SD, Irwig L. A comparison of methods to detect publication bias in meta-analysis. Statistics in Medicine 2001; 20(4):641-654.
48. Peters J, Sutton A, Jones D, Abrams K, Rushton L. Comparison of two methods to detect publication bias in meta-analysis. Journal of the American Medical Association 2006; 295(6):676-680.
49. Rucker G, Schwarzer G, Carpenter J. Arcsine test for publication bias in meta-analyses with binary outcomes. Statistics in Medicine 2008; 27(5):746-763.
50. Schwarzer G, Antes G, Schumacher M. A test for publication bias in meta-analysis with sparse binary data. Statistics in Medicine 2007; 26(4):721-733.
51. Moreno SG, Sutton AJ, Thompson JR, Ades AE, Abrams KR, Cooper NJ. A generalized weighting regression-derived meta-analysis estimator robust to small-study effects and heterogeneity. Statistics in Medicine 2012; 31(14):1407-1417.
52. Rucker G, Schwarzer G, Carpenter JR, Binder H, Schumacher M. Treatment-effect estimates adjusted for small-study effects via a limit meta-analysis. Biostatistics 2011; 12(1):122-142.
53. Duval S, Tweedie R. A nonparametric 'Trim and Fill' method of accounting for publication bias in meta-analysis. Journal of American Statistical Association 2000; 95(449):89-98.
54. Duval S, Tweedie R. Trim and fill: s simple funnel-plot-based method of testing and adjusting for publication bias in meta-analysis. Biometrics 2000; 56(2):455-463.
55. Copas J, Shi JQ. Meta-analysis, funnel plots and sensitivity analysis. Biostatistics 2000; 1(3):247-262.
56. Copas JB, Shi JQ. A sensitivity analysis for publication bias in systematic reviews. Statistical Methods in Medical Research 2001; 10(4):251-265.
57. Preston C, Ashby D, Smyth R. Adjusting for publication bias: modelling the selection process. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 2004; 10(2):313-322.
58. Vevea JL, Woods CM. Publication bias in research synthesis: sensitivity analysis using a priori weight functions. Psychological Methods 2005; 10(4):428-443.
59. Iyengar S, Greenhouse JB. Selection models and the file drawer problem. Statistical Science 1988; 3(1):109-117.
60. Ioannidis JP. Excess significance bias in the literature on brain volume abnormalities. Archives of General Psychiatry 2011; 68(8):773-780.
61. Tsilidis KK, Papatheodorou SI, Evangelou E, Ioannidis JP. Evaluation of excess statistical significance in meta-analyses of 98 biomarker associations with cancer risk. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2012; 104(24):1867-1878.
62. Tzoulaki I, Siontis KC, Evangelou E, Ioannidis JP. Bias in associations of emerging biomarkers with cardiovascular disease. JAMA Internal Medicine 2013; 173(8):664-671.
63. Phillips CV. Publication bias in situ. BMC Medical Research Methodology 2004; 4:20.
64. Ioannidis JP. Effect of the statistical significance of results on the time to completion and publication of randomized efficacy trials. Journal of the American Medical Association 1998; 279(4):281-286.
65. Easterbrook PJ, Berlin JA, Gopalan R, Matthews DR. Publication bias in clinical research. Lancet 1991; 337(8746):867-872.
66. Wilson P, Rush R, Hussey S, Puckering C, Sim F, Allely CS, Doku P, McConnachie A, Gillberg C. How evidence-based is an 'evidence-based parenting program'? A PRISMA systematic review and meta-analysis of Triple P. BMC Medicine 2012; 10:130.
67. Higgins JP, Green S. Cochrane handbook for systematic reviews of interventions version 5.1.0 [updated March 2011]. The Cochrane Collaboration, 2011.
68. Song F, Parekh S, Hooper L, Loke YK, Ryder J, Sutton AJ, Hing C, Kwok CS, Pang C, Harvey I. Dissemination and publication of research findings: an updated review of related biases. Health Technology Assessment 2010; 14(8):1-193.
69. Kicinski M. How does under-reporting of negative and inconclusive results affect the false-positive rate in meta-analysis? A simulation study. BMJ Open 2014; 4(8):e004831.
70. Prinz F, Schlange T, Asadullah K. Believe it or not: how much can we rely on published data on potential drug targets. Nature Reviews. Drug Discovery 2011; 10(9):712.
71. Begley CG, Ellis LM. Drug development: raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature 2012; 483(7391):531-533.
72. Dahlman I, Eaves IA, Kosoy R, Morrison VA, Heward J, Gough SC, Allahabadia A, Franklyn JA, Tuomilehto J, Tuomilehto-Wolf E, Cucca F, Guja C, Ionescu-Tirgoviste C, Stevens H, Carr P, Nutland S, McKinney P, Shield JP, Wang W, Cordell HJ, Walker N, Todd JA, Concannon P. Parameters for reliable results in genetic association studies in common disease. Nature Genetics 2002; 30(2):149-150.
73. Ioannidis JP, Ntzani EE, Trikalinos TA, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG. Replication validity of genetic association studies. Nature Genetics 2001; 29(3):306-309.
74. Colhoun HM, McKeigue PM, Davey Smith G. Problems of reporting genetic associations with complex outcomes. Lancet 2003; 361(9360):865-872.
75. Chanock SJ, Manolio T, Boehnke M, Boerwinkle E, Hunter DJ, Thomas G, Hirschhorn JN, Abecasis G, Altshuler D, Bailey-Wilson JE, Brooks LD, Cardon LR, Daly M, Donnelly P, Fraumeni JF, Freimer NB, Gerhard DS, Gunter C, Guttmacher AE, Guyer MS, Harris EL, Hoh J, Hoover R, Kong CA, Merikangas KR, Morton CC, Palmer LJ, Phimister EG, Rice JP, Roberts J, Rotimi C, Tucker MA, Vogan KJ, Wacholder S, Wijsman EM, Winn DM, Collins FS. Replicating genotype-phenotype associations. Nature 2007; 447(7145):655-660.
76. Ioannidis JP. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2005; 2(8):e124.