Quantifying replicability and consistency in systematic reviews

Abstract

Systematic reviews of interventions are important tools for synthesizing evidence from multiple studies. They serve to increase power and improve precision, in the same way that larger studies can do, but also to establish the consistency of effects and replicability of results across studies which are not identical. In this work we suggest to incorporate replicability analysis tools to quantify the consistency and conflict. These are offered both for the fixed-effect and for the random-effects meta-analyses. We motivate and demonstrate our approach and its implications by examples from systematic reviews from the Cochrane library, and offer a way to incorporate our suggestions in their standard reporting system.