Introduction to Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
Participants in this workshop will receive an introduction to systematic review and meta-analysis sufficient to enable them to begin a systematic review of their own. The concepts, methods and issues will be illustrated with published examples on a wide range of topics in observational and experimental epidemiology. Participants will develop an appreciation for delimiting the scope of a systematic review and for defining, searching and retrieving “the literature” on a topic. We learn the use and interpretation of a variety of meta-analytic methods, including the drawing of forest plots, the drawing and analysis of funnel plots, assessment of overall heterogeneity and meta-regression. We will discuss at considerable length what it takes for a literature to be “meta-analyzable” and for the representation of a literature in the form of a single summary estimate to be warranted.
