Quantifying Effect Sizes in Randomised and Controlled Trials: A Review

Abstract

Meta-analysis aggregates quantitative outcomes from multiple scientific studies to produce comparable effect sizes. The resultant integration of useful information leads to a statistical estimate with higher power and more reliable point estimate when compared to the measure derived from any individual study. Effect sizes are usually estimated using mean differences of the outcomes of treatment and control groups in experimental studies. Although different software exists for the calculations in meta-analysis, understanding how the calculations are done can be useful to many researchers, particularly where the values reported in the literature data is not applicable in the software available to the researcher. In this paper, search was conducted online primarily using Google and PubMed to retrieve relevant articles on the different methods of calculating the effect sizes and the associated confidence intervals, effect size correlation, p values and I2, and how to evaluate heterogeneity and publication bias are presented.