Abstract
Received: 30 October 2001 Published online: 23 January 2002 © Springer-Verlag 2002 results across independent studies that address a related set of research questions. Meta-analysis goes a step further than the review article, by using statistical procedure to combine the results of different studies [1]. Huque [4] defined “meta-analysis” as: ‘A statistical analysis that combines or integrates the results of several independent clinical trials considered by the analyst to be “combinable”’. In a Medline search, Egger et al. [2] identified 566 articles (excluding those published as letters) published in 1995 and indexed with the medical subject heading (MeSH) term ‘meta-analysis’. They randomly selected 100 of these articles and examined them further. Sixty articles reported on actual meta-analyses, and 40 were methodological papers, editorials, and traditional reviews. The aims of metaanalysis are as follows [6]:
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