ArticlePloS one2024
Evaluating meta-analysis as a replication success measure.
Article in PloS one, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- The assessment of replicability using the sum ofRoyal Society open science · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe importance of replication in the social and behavioural sciences has been emphasized for decades. Various frequentist and Bayesian approaches have been proposed to qualify a replication study as successful or unsuccessful. One of them is meta-analysis. The focus of the present study is on the way meta-analysis functions as a replication success metric. To investigate this, original and replication studies that are part of two large-scale replication projects were used. For each original study, the probability of replication success was calculated using meta-analysis under different assumptions of the underlying population effect when replication results were unknown. The accuracy of the predicted overall replication success was evaluated once replication results became available using adjusted Brier scores.
resultsOur results showed that meta-analysis performed poorly when used as a replication success metric. In many cases, quantifying replication success using meta-analysis resulted in the conclusion where the replication was deemed a success regardless of the results of the replication study. DISCUSSION: We conclude that when using meta-analysis as a replication success metric, it has a relatively high probability of finding evidence in favour of a non-zero population effect even when it is zero. This behaviour largely results from the significance of the original study. Furthermore, we argue that there are fundamental reasons against using meta-analysis as a metric for replication success.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.