Abstract
Abstract Publication bias and related bias in meta‐analysis is often examined by visually checking for asymmetry in funnel plots of treatment effect against its standard error. Formal statistical tests of funnel plot asymmetry have been proposed, but when applied to binary outcome data these can give false‐positive rates that are higher than the nominal level in some situations (large treatment effects, or few events per trial, or all trials of similar sizes). We develop a modified linear regression test for funnel plot asymmetry based on the efficient score and its variance, Fisher's information. The performance of this test is compared to the other proposed tests in simulation analyses based on the characteristics of published controlled trials. When there is little or no between‐trial heterogeneity, this modified test has a false‐positive rate close to the nominal level while maintaining similar power to the original linear regression test (‘Egger’ test). When the degree of between‐trial heterogeneity is large, none of the tests that have been proposed has uniformly good properties. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Keywords
Funnel plotStatisticsPublication biasType I and type II errorsRandom effects modelMeta-analysisSample size determinationLinear regressionNominal levelMathematicsRegressionStatistical hypothesis testingAsymmetryStatistical powerEconometricsConfidence intervalMedicineInternal medicine
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Publication Info
- Year
- 2005
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 20
- Pages
- 3443-3457
- Citations
- 2204
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
Roger Harbord,
Matthias Egger,
Jonathan A C Sterne
(2005).
A modified test for small‐study effects in meta‐analyses of controlled trials with binary endpoints.
Statistics in Medicine
, 25
(20)
, 3443-3457.
https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.2380
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1002/sim.2380