MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W171710605 · doi:10.2427/5929

How I was converted from skeptic to enthusiast about meta- analysis

2006· article· en· W171710605 on OpenAlexaff
Malcolm Maclure

Bibliographic record

VenueItalian Journal of Public Health · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicMeta-analysis and systematic reviews
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMeta-analysisSkepticismMedicinePhilosophyInternal medicineEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

When I first heard of meta-analysis in the mid-1980s,I was suspicious.After slaving for 3 years on a case-control study of renal adenocarcinoma that yielded just 3 papers, the idea of someone else getting a quick publication by quantitatively pooling my findings with other studies seemed parasitic, if not plagiarist. On the other hand, I was aware that reviews of scientific literature often simply bolstered the authors’ opinions by citing supportive studies and glossing over, dismissing or overlooking unsupportive studies. My suspicion was reduced by Meir Stampfer’s important paper pooling results of streptokinase trials. I decided meta-analysis might be appropriate for drug trials. However, I was troubled by the conflict between the apparent goal of metaanalysis –- to achieve statistical significance or tight confidence intervals — and Rothman’s and others’ criticism of p-values. Meta-analysis seemed to me to be a fancy name for combining results to get a better p-value.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.187
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.522
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.813
Threshold uncertainty score0.988

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1870.522
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.007
Bibliometrics0.0060.003
Science and technology studies0.0030.013
Scholarly communication0.0150.020
Open science0.0040.005
Research integrity0.0140.042
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.772
GPT teacher head0.512
Teacher spread0.260 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
DomainMethods
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueItalian Journal of Public HealthSame topicMeta-analysis and systematic reviewsFrench-language works237,207