MetaNSUE

MetaNSUE is a meta-analytic method created by Joaquim Radua to include studies that report that The Effects were not statistically significant but do not report any other information of them (e.g. statistics or p-values).

Motivation

It is not uncommon that studies do not report the effects when they do not reach statistical significance. For example, they may simply say that the groups did not show statistically significant differences, without report any other information. These effects May Be called non-statistically significant unreported effects (NSUE). Unfortunately, exclusion of NSUEs would lead to a situation similar to publication bias, but their inclusion (assuming null effects) would also bias the meta-analysis.

The MetaNSUE approach

The main steps of a simple meta-analysis with MetaNSUE are as follows:

  • Maximum likelihood estimation of the meta-analytic effect and the heterogeneity between studies.
  • Multiple imputation of the NSUEs adding noise to the estimate of the effect.
  • Separate meta-analyses for each imputed dataset.
  • Pooling of the results of these meta-analyses.

MetaNSUE software

MetaNSUE is software written to conduct meta-analyses including NSUEs. It is distributed as freeware including an R package ("metansue") and a graphical interface.