The Tyranny of Meta‐analysis and the Misuse of Randomized Controlled Trials in Maternity Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent meta-analyses of key areas in maternity care have covered home birth and epidural analgesia. In each of these cases serious issues have arisen from the use of subjective inclusion and exclusion criteria, heterogeneity of included studies, and inclusion of studies that were conducted in settings that were not representative of usual maternity care. This latter flaw is especially notable for early epidural analgesia, where study environments with very low cesarean section rates are included. Such study settings lack external validity and have raised concerns about the political uses of meta-analysis. For a meta-analysis to be useful, the included studies must be broadly representative of the way that maternity care is carried out in usual birth environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.769 | 0.877 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.023 | 0.015 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".