[R-meta] Results interpretation publication bias

[Dr. Guido Schwarzer]

Dear Wilma,

Despite having a significant Thompson-Sharp test for funnel plot asymmetry (BTW, I think you didn't report the p-values for the Egger and Begg-Mazumdar tests), the result of the limit meta-analysis basically says that there is no real problem with small study effects as the bias-adjusted and the original random effects estimate are very close to each other: 0.39 [0.33; 0.44] vs 0.36 [0.31; 0.41]

Would this difference change your overall conclusions at all?

Concerning the one potentially influential study, you could run a sensitivity analysis by excluding the study and running the Thompson-Sharp test and other analyses on the reduced data set.

Best,
Guido

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