College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University, Bedford Park, Australia.
Department of Neurosurgery, Flinders Medical Centre, Bedford Park, Australia.
Neurosurgery. 2022 Mar 1;90(3):262-269. doi: 10.1227/NEU.0000000000001788. Epub 2022 Jan 17.
Statistically significant positive results are more likely to be published than negative or insignificant outcomes. This phenomenon, also termed publication bias, can skew the interpretation of meta-analyses. The widespread presence of publication bias in the biomedical literature has led to the development of various statistical approaches, such as the visual inspection of funnel plots, Begg test, and Egger test, to assess and account for it.
To determine how well publication bias is assessed for in meta-analyses of the neurosurgical literature.
A systematic search for meta-analyses from the top neurosurgery journals was conducted. Data relevant to the presence, assessment, and adjustments for publication bias were extracted.
The search yielded 190 articles. Most of the articles (n = 108, 56.8%) were assessed for publication bias, of which 40 (37.0%) found evidence for publication bias whereas 61 (56.5%) did not. In the former case, only 11 (27.5%) made corrections for the bias using the trim-and-fill method, whereas 29 (72.5%) made no correction. Thus, 111 meta-analyses (58.4%) either did not assess for publication bias or, if assessed to be present, did not adjust for it.
Taken together, these results indicate that publication bias remains largely unaccounted for in neurosurgical meta-analyses.
统计学上显著的阳性结果比阴性或无显著性的结果更有可能被发表。这种现象也被称为发表偏倚，可以歪曲荟萃分析的解释。发表偏倚在生物医学文献中的广泛存在导致了各种统计方法的发展，例如漏斗图的视觉检查、贝格检验和埃格检验，以评估和考虑到它。
确定在神经外科学文献的荟萃分析中，发表偏倚的评估情况如何。
对顶级神经外科学杂志的荟萃分析进行了系统搜索。提取了与发表偏倚的存在、评估和调整相关的数据。
搜索结果为 190 篇文章。大多数文章（n=108，56.8%）评估了发表偏倚，其中 40 篇（37.0%）发现了发表偏倚的证据，而 61 篇（56.5%）没有。在前一种情况下，只有 11 篇（27.5%）使用修剪和填充法对偏倚进行了校正，而 29 篇（72.5%）没有进行校正。因此，111 篇荟萃分析（58.4%）要么没有评估发表偏倚，要么如果评估为存在偏倚，则没有进行校正。
综上所述，这些结果表明，发表偏倚在神经外科学的荟萃分析中仍然很大程度上没有得到考虑。
