PEDIATRICS Vol. 78 No. 6 December 1986, pp. 1145-1147
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Accumulating Evidence: Using Meta-Analysis to Carry Out Research Reviews in Pediatrics

RICHARD J. LIGHT PHD1

1 Graduate School of Education and Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Cambridge

In pediatric research, as in most fields, new findings generate the most excitement. Summarizing old ones has traditionally been a task assigned to research assistants. But as research results accumulate, should we make stronger efforts to see what a body of research, taken overall, tells us? And would systematic methods to do this improve on the ad hoc or idiosyncratic efforts of the past?

In this spirit, several books and articles have recently appeared describing procedures called meta-analysis.1-9 They urge both researchers and policymakers to improve the quality of research reviews by making them more systematic, and they outline simple but concrete techniques for doing this.