BACKGROUND The increased use of meta-analysis in systematic reviews of healthcare interventions has highlighted several types of bias that can arise during the completion of a randomised controlled trial. Study publication bias and outcome reporting bias have been recognised as a potential threat to the validity of meta-analysis and can make the readily available evidence unreliable for decisio...

The communication of research findings is one of our most important functions. Not communicating research findings can be harmful in many ways. Publication bias is a well-known phenomenon that affects cancer epidemiology, biomarker research, and cancer prevention. As these areas grow, along with the technologies, the risk of publication bias grows. To avoid the pitfall of publication bias and e...

BACKGROUND The increased use of meta-analysis in systematic reviews of healthcare interventions has highlighted several types of bias that can arise during the completion of a randomised controlled trial. Study publication bias has been recognised as a potential threat to the validity of meta-analysis and can make the readily available evidence unreliable for decision making. Until recently, ou...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Publication bias and related biases can lead to overly optimistic conclusions in systematic reviews. The funnel plot, which is frequently used to detect such biases, has not yet been subjected to empirical evaluation as a visual tool. We sought to determine whether researchers can correctly identify publication bias from visual inspection of funnel plots in typical-size...

Copas’ method corrects a pooled estimate from an aggregated data meta-analysis for publication bias. Its performance has been studied one particular mechanism of We show through simulations that is not robust against other realistic mechanisms. This questions the usefulness method, since bias mechanisms are typically unknown in practice.