2018/12/21 by Jiandong Shi, Aimin Wu, Shi, Jiandong +3
Decision Sciences · Medicine · #Applications (stat.AP) #Cerebral Palsy and Movement Disorders #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Foot and Ankle Surgery #Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1812.09061
openalex publication_date 2018/12/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Meta-analysis is an important tool for combining results from multiple studies and has been widely used in evidence-based medicine for several decades. This paper reports, for the first time, an interesting and valuable paradox in random-effects meta-analysis that is likely to occur when the number of studies is small and/or the heterogeneity is large. With the incredible paradox, we hence advocate meta-analysts to be extremely cautious when interpreting the final results from the random-effects meta-analysis. And more importantly, with the unexpected dilemma in making decisions, the new paradox has raised an open question whether the current random-effects model is reasonable and tenable for meta-analysis, or it needs to be abandoned or further improved to some extent.