The case of the misleading funnel plot

By Joseph Lau, J. P. Ioannidis, Norma Terrin, C. Schmid, Ingram Olkin. British medical journal, 2006

1,590 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/365e67bcd29c92086abc27fa0c87ff41a7f00cd7

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Douglas G. Altman
2. David Moher
3. John P. A. Ioannidis
4. G. Guyatt
5. Holger J. Schünemann
6. J. Brożek
7. P. Gøtzsche
8. R. Ewing

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

1. David Moher
2. Douglas G. Altman
3. P. Erwin
4. Holger J. Schünemann
5. G. Guyatt
6. J. Brożek
7. John P. A. Ioannidis
8. K. F. Schulz

In Statistics and Probability

1. David Moher
2. Douglas G. Altman
3. John P. A. Ioannidis
4. K. F. Schulz
5. J. Tetzlaff
6. Mike Clarke
7. P. Gøtzsche
8. A. Liberati

Citations in the corpus

• The PRISMA Statement for Reporting Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Studies That Evaluate Health Care Interventions: Explanation and Elaboration (2009, background): “, Egger’s test) are often used (213–215), although their interpretation can be problematic (216, 217).”
• PICTURE THIS: A SIMPLE GRAPH THAT REVEALS MUCH ADO ABOUT RESEARCH (2010, neutral): “…a result, produce highly skewed funnel graphs (Stanley and Rosenberger, 2009).6 Second, funnel asymmetry might arise from the systematic heterogeneity of the data and/or the methodologies employed by different studies (see, for example, Sterne et al., 2001; Terrin et al., 2005; Lau et al., 2006).”
• Long-term mental health of war-refugees: a systematic literature review (2015, neutral): “[90–93].”
• Mastery Learning for Health Professionals Using Technology-Enhanced Simulation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2013, background): “51,52 Although all of the studies in this review met established criteria for mastery learning, 8 we nonetheless found diversity in the specific implementation of this model.”
• Computerized Virtual Patients in Health Professions Education: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2010, methodology): “We used funnel plots to assess for publication bias, and although this method is limited in the presence of large inconsistency, 38 it did not suggest that publication bias substantially affected our conclusions.”
• The PRISMA Statement for Reporting Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Studies That Evaluate Health Care Interventions: Explanation and Elaboration (2009, background): “, Egger’s test) are often used (213–215), although their interpretation can be problematic (216, 217).”
• The Impact of Supervision on Worker Outcomes: A Meta‐analysis (2009, methodology): “may also be called into question because the sample is smaller than that required to achieve sufficient statistical power for Egger’s test, which is mainly based on a regression method (Lau et al. 2006).”
• The effects of imagery interventions in sports: a meta-analysis (2020, methodology): “We approached this problem by analyzing the symmetry of the distribution around the mean through visual inspection of funnel plots and computing Egger regressions (Egger et al., 1997; Lau et al., 2006).”
• Biodiversity inhibits parasites: Broad evidence for the dilution effect (2015, methodology): “We did not use funnel plots or rank correlation tests to assess publication bias in this dataset, because these analyses are invalidated by the presence of underlying heterogeneity among effect sizes, for example, random effects of species and experiments described above (32).”