Meta-Analysis, Meta-Regression and Moderator-Analysis

Meta

Here are some suggestions for definitions that may help to clarify the terminology:

  • Meta-analysis: A general term to denote the collection of statistical methods and techniques used to aggregate/synthesize and compare the results from several related studies in a systematic manner.
  • Moderator analysis: In the context of a meta-analysis, this refers to using some kind of method in an attempt to find and account for systematic differences in the size of the effect or outcome that is being meta-analyzed.
  • Meta-regression: This is one possible way of conducting a moderator analysis, where we regress the observed effect sizes on one or multiple study characteristics.

There are other ways of conducting a moderator analysis. For example, one could simply subgroup studies based on a categorical moderator (using dummy variables in a meta-regression model is quite similar). Not commonly used, but one could also consider mixture models or clustering techniques.

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