Anemic Use of Publication Bias Assessments in Hematology Systematic Reviews: a Chronic Disease

Publication bias (PB) is an over-representation of statistically significant results in the published literature and may exaggerate summary effect estimates in hematology systematic reviews (SRs). Omitting non-significant results in SRs may therefore affect clinical decision making. We investigate ways that systematic reviewers in hematology attempted to limit PB during the search process as well as the statistical methods used to evaluate it. For a subset of reviews not reporting PB evaluations, we performed our own assessments for PB to determine its likelihood among these reviews.
Source: Clinical Lymphoma, Myeloma and Leukemia - Category: Hematology Authors: Source Type: research