A protocol for a systematic review on the impact of unpublished studies and studies published in the gray literature in meta-analyses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Meta-analyses are particularly vulnerable to the effects of publication bias. Despite methodologists' best efforts to locate all evidence for a given topic the most comprehensive searches are likely to miss unpublished studies and studies that are published in the gray literature only. If the results of the missing studies differ systematically from the published ones, a meta-analysis will be biased with an inaccurate assessment of the intervention's effects.As part of the OPEN project (http://www.open-project.eu) we will conduct a systematic review with the following objectives:▪ To assess the impact of studies that are not published or published in the gray literature on pooled effect estimates in meta-analyses (quantitative measure).▪ To assess whether the inclusion of unpublished studies or studies published in the gray literature leads to different conclusions in meta-analyses (qualitative measure). INCLUSION CRITERIA: Methodological research projects of a cohort of meta-analyses which compare the effect of the inclusion or exclusion of unpublished studies or studies published in the gray literature. LITERATURE SEARCH: To identify relevant research projects we will conduct electronic searches in Medline, Embase and The Cochrane Library; check reference lists; and contact experts. OUTCOMES: 1) The extent to which the effect estimate in a meta-analyses changes with the inclusion or exclusion of studies that were not published or published in the gray literature; and 2) the extent to which the inclusion of unpublished studies impacts the meta-analyses' conclusions. DATA COLLECTION: Information will be collected on the area of health care; the number of meta-analyses included in the methodological research project; the number of studies included in the meta-analyses; the number of study participants; the number and type of unpublished studies; studies published in the gray literature and published studies; the sources used to retrieve studies that are unpublished, published in the gray literature, or commercially published; and the validity of the methodological research project. DATA SYNTHESIS: DATA SYNTHESIS will involve descriptive and statistical summaries of the findings of the included methodological research projects. DISCUSSION: Results are expected to be publicly available in the middle of 2013.
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Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Protocol About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
| gpt | MetaresearchMeta-epidemiology (narrow)Meta-epidemiology (broad) Domain: Methods · Genre: Protocol About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | medium |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.571 | 0.650 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.139 | 0.033 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it