Meta-Analysis of Studies with Non Statistically-Significant
Unreported Effects
Description
A novel meta-analytic method that allows an unbiased inclusion of studies with Non Statistically-Significant Unreported Effects (NSUEs). Briefly, the method first calculates the interval where the unreported effects (e.g. t-values) should be according to the threshold of statistical significance used in each study. Afterwards, maximizing likelihood techniques are used to impute the expected effect size of each study with NSUEs, accounting for between-study heterogeneity and potential covariates. Multiple imputations of the NSUEs are then randomly created based on the expected value, variance and statistical significance bounds. Finally, a restricted-maximum likelihood random-effects meta-analysis is separately conducted for each set of imputations, and estimations from these meta-analyses are pooled. Please read the reference in 'meta.nsue' for details of the procedure.