The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Can meta-analyses be trusted?
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
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Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Statistical Aspects of the Analysis of Data From Retrospective Studies of Disease
(1959) · JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute · doi:10.1093/jnci/22.4.719 · Cited by 14,689
Publication bias in clinical research
Easterbrook, P. J., Gopalan, R., Berlin, J. A., & Matthews, D. R. (1991) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/0140-6736(91)90201-y · Cited by 3,109
A method for assessing the quality of a randomized control trial
Chalmers, T. C., Smith, H., Blackburn, B., Silverman, B., Schroeder, B., Reitman, D., & Ambroz, A. (1981) · Controlled Clinical Trials · doi:10.1016/0197-2456(81)90056-8 · Cited by 1,349
Publication bias: the case for an international registry of clinical trials.
Simes, R. J. (1986) · Journal of Clinical Oncology · doi:10.1200/jco.1986.4.10.1529 · Cited by 747
Publication bias and clinical trials
Dickersin, K., Chan, S., Chalmersx, T. C., Sacks, H. S., & Smith, H. (1987) · Controlled Clinical Trials · doi:10.1016/0197-2456(87)90155-3 · Cited by 715
Cited by
Duval, S., & Tweedie, R. (2000) · Biometrics · doi:10.1111/j.0006-341x.2000.00455.x · Cited by 14,099
Deeks, J. J., Altman, D. G., & Bradburn, M. J. (2001) · Systematic Reviews in Health Care · doi:10.1002/9780470693926.ch15 · Cited by 2,163
Comprehensive geriatric assessment: a meta-analysis of controlled trials
Stuck, A. E., Siu, A. L., Wieland, G. D., Rubenstein, L. Z., & Adams, J. (1993) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/0140-6736(93)92884-v · Cited by 1,974
Excess mortality of mental disorder
Harris, C., & Barraclough, B. (1998) · British Journal of Psychiatry · doi:10.1192/bjp.173.1.11 · Cited by 1,881
Morley, S., Eccleston, C., & Williams, A. (1999) · Pain · doi:10.1016/s0304-3959(98)00255-3 · Cited by 1,597
Metadata
- Authors
- Thompson, S. G., & Pocock, S. J.
- Venue
- The Lancet
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 1991-11
- Volume
- 338
- Issue
- 8775
- Pages
- 1127-1130
- ISSN
- 0099-5355 (ISSN-L)
- 0140-6736
- OpenAlex
- W2030269002
- Cited by
- 487
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 56.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Can meta-analyses be trusted? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/0140-6736(91)91975-z
- The paper
- Thompson, S. G., & Pocock, S. J. (1991). Can meta-analyses be trusted? The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/0140-6736(91)91975-z
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.