On the bias produced by quality scores in meta-analysis, and a hierarchical view of proposed solutions.

By Sander Greenland, K. O'Rourke. Biostatistics, 2001

336 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa2e587c279288faf0bd4a59abd3bf24fc3d23ed

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Citations in the corpus

Empirically Supported Treatment: Recommendations for a New Model (2015, background): “…the quality of reporting with the quality of trial conduct, to assign weights to different items in ways that are dif-ﬁcult to justify, and to yield inconsistent and unpredictable associations with intervention effect estimates (Greenland & O’Rourke, 2001; Juni, Witschi, Bloch, & Egger, 1999).”
Experiences of Domestic Violence and Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (2012, background): “Quality scoring, particularly for observational research, is contestable [26]; yet we wanted to exclude poor studies that threatened the validity of our findings.”
The PRISMA Statement for Reporting Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses of Studies That Evaluate Health Care Interventions: Explanation and Elaboration (2009, background): “There are a great many scales available (192), although we caution their use based on theoretical grounds (193) and emerging empirical evidence (194).”
Bias modelling in evidence synthesis (2009, background): “Weighting the analysis by quality scores is known to be inadequate (Greenland and O’Rourke, 2001); among other reasons, many quality items contributing to the score may have no association with bias, and there is no allowance for the direction of biases.”
Still too far to walk: Literature review of the determinants of delivery service use (2009, neutral): “It is doubtful whether a systematically applied subjective judgement about the general quality of the studies reviewed would be helpful in making a comparison more informative [78].”
The Effects of Mild Perioperative Hypothermia on Blood Loss and Transfusion Requirement (2008, background): “A formal incorporation of the quality scores into our meta-analysis was not performed because of the problems with quality scores in general, including bias and subjectivity.(39) We did, however, assess whether there was an obvious correlation between the estimated treatment effects and the quality ”
The effects of physical activity on sleep: a meta-analytic review (2015, methodology): “This tool was developed to replace quality scales and checklists, which have been shown to be inconsistent and inadequate in appraising clinical trials (Greenland & O’Rourke, 2001; Juni et al., 1999).”
Development of a critical appraisal tool to assess the quality of cross-sectional studies (AXIS) (2016, background): “However, it has been debated that quality numerical scales can be problematic as the outputs from assessment checklists are not linear and as such are difficult to sum up or weight making them unpredictable at assessing study quality.(39) 42 43 The AXIS tool has the benefit of providing the user the”