<p>I'm teaching myself how to do meta-analysis, and as a beginner to the subject I would like to read journal article examples of meta-analysis done well.</p>

<p>It's easy enough to find examples of meta-analysis, but I don't have the expertise to assess the quality of those examples. It would be helpful for me in my effort to self teach to read meta-analysis articles done well as well as explanations of what is being done rignt in those articles. The flip would also be useful (that is, to read articles where the meta-analysis could be greatly improved and an explanation of where they could be improved).</p>

<p>Is Cross Validated an appropriate place to ask for this information?</p>

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<p>EDIT1: I tried to put this in a comment but ended up being too verbose for the comments section.</p>

<p>I do see how the question wouldn’t be a good fit for the website (too subjective, insufficiently finite). That said, I do think there is value in seeing examples of things done well. Guidelines are helpful, but to see everything pulled together in an example offers a different kind of insight. A list of anatomy drawing guidelines is helpful in learning how to draw (e.g., the head is one-eighth of the length of the body), but it’s helpful in a different way than actually seeing a figure drawing. </p>

<p>Now with figure drawings, most people can assess whether or not something looks right. With meta-analysis, that’s not so, and of the reviews of meta-analyses I’ve read (meta-meta-analyses?), it seems many meta-analyses fail to meet basic guidelines even though they passed the peer review process. I would guess that’s because the peer reviewers had subject matter expertise but not meta-analysis expertise, and I would think that the authors of those “needs improvement” meta-analyses would have been well served by seeing acceptable examples of meta analyses. I know I would.</p>

<p>Regarding the point that people do things differently. No doubt there’s variation in how things can be done acceptably, but I don’t think that makes individual examples of acceptably done meta-analysis useless. Some journals share example abstracts, figures, tables, etc. in their writer’s guides, and I think that’s helpful even if there are other ways to do things acceptably. I think it would be the same for seeing an entire example of a meta-analysis written up, but I am more than happy to agree to disagree on this point. </p>
