Meta-analyses of experimental data in animal nutrition.
By D. Sauvant, P. Schmidely, Jean-Jacques Daudin, Normand R. St-Pierre. Animal, 2008
424 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Research in animal sciences, especially nutrition, increasingly requires processing and modeling of databases. In certain areas of research, the number of publications and results per publications is increasing, thus periodically requiring quantitative summarizations of literature data. In such instances, statistical methods dealing with the analysis of summary (literature) data, known as meta-analyses, must be used. The implementation of a meta-analysis is done in several phases. The first phase concerns the definition of the study objectives and the identification of the criteria to be used in the selection of prior publications to be used in the construction of the database. Publications must be scrupulously evaluated before being entered into the database. During this phase, it is important to carefully encode each record with pertinent descriptive attributes (experiments, treatments, etc.) to serve as important reference points for the rest of the analysis. Databases from literature data are inherently unbalanced statistically, leading to considerable analytical and interpretation difficulties; missing data are frequent, and data structures are not the outcomes of a classical experimental system. An initial graphical examination of the data is recommended to enhance a global view as well as to identify specific relationships to be investigated. This phase is followed by a study of the meta-system made up of the database to be interpreted. These steps condition the definition of the applied statistical model. Variance decomposition must account for inter- and intrastudy sources; dependent and independent variables must be identified either as discrete (qualitative) or continuous (quantitative). Effects must be defined as either fixed or random. Often, observations must be weighed to account for differences in the precision of the reported means. Once model parameters are estimated, extensive analyses of residual variations must be performed. The roles of the different treatments and studies in the results obtained must be identified. Often, this requires returning to an earlier step in the process. Thus, meta-analyses have inherent heuristic qualities.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Animal Science and Zoology, Genetics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b460b74344d85f07b480ca88ef022261fab69465
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Citations in the corpus
- A meta-analysis of the impact of stocking rate on the productivity of pasture-based milk production systems (2010, methodology): “However, results from a single experiment will not provide a definitive understanding of the effect of SR treatment because the conditions under which observations are made in a single experiment are inevitably narrow (Sauvant et al., 2008).”
- Voluntary feed intake and digestibility of four domestic ruminant species as influenced by dietary constituents: A meta-analysis (2014, methodology): “Combining data from various reports into a meta-analysis can be a useful tool to deal with the inconsistencies exhibited across a variety of experimental conditions of different studies (Charbonneau et al., 2006; Sauvant et al., 2008).”
- A universal equation to predict methane production of forage-fed cattle in Australia (2016, methodology): “A mixedmodel framework was well suited to this end (St-Pierre 2001; Sauvant et al. 2008).”
- Comparison of methane production between C3 and C4 grasses and legumes (2011, methodology): “The meta-analysis followed recommendations of Sauvant et al. (2008) using Minitab (2007).”