Characteristics of meta-analyses and their component studies in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews: a cross-sectional, descriptive analysis
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BACKGROUND: Cochrane systematic reviews collate and summarise studies of the effects of healthcare interventions. The characteristics of these reviews and the meta-analyses and individual studies they contain provide insights into the nature of healthcare research and important context for the development of relevant statistical and other methods. METHODS: We classified every meta-analysis with at least two studies in every review in the January 2008 issue of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) according to the medical specialty, the types of interventions being compared and the type of outcome. We provide descriptive statistics for numbers of meta-analyses, numbers of component studies and sample sizes of component studies, broken down by these categories. RESULTS: We included 2321 reviews containing 22,453 meta-analyses, which themselves consist of data from 112,600 individual studies (which may appear in more than one meta-analysis). Meta-analyses in the areas of gynaecology, pregnancy and childbirth (21%), mental health (13%) and respiratory diseases (13%) are well represented in the CDSR. Most meta-analyses address drugs, either with a control or placebo group (37%) or in a comparison with another drug (25%). The median number of meta-analyses per review is six (inter-quartile range 3 to 12). The median number of studies included in the meta-analyses with at least two studies is three (inter-quartile range 2 to 6). Sample sizes of individual studies range from 2 to 1,242,071, with a median of 91 participants. DISCUSSION: It is clear that the numbers of studies eligible for meta-analyses are typically very small for all medical areas, outcomes and interventions covered by Cochrane reviews. This highlights the particular importance of suitable methods for the meta-analysis of small data sets. There was little variation in number of studies per meta-analysis across medical areas, across outcome data types or across types of interventions being compared.
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The majority of published meta-analyses contain ten or fewer studies.
“However, the majority of published meta-analyses contain ten or fewer studies (48) .”
From Effects of low-carbohydrate diets<i>v</i>. low-fat diets on body weight and cardiovascular risk factors: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials (2016) · cites this paper as [48]
Table 5 (Results, “Number of studies per meta-analysis”) shows that 90% of the 22,453 meta-analyses examined contained ten or fewer studies. The claim extends that finding from meta-analyses in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews to published meta-analyses generally, which this study does not establish. (LLM, conf=0.86)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredSmall numbers of trials in meta-analyses appear to be typical.
“although small numbers appear to be typical [38”
From Assessing the feasibility and impact of clinical trial trustworthiness checks via an application to Cochrane Reviews: Stage 2 of the INSPECT-SR project (2025) · cites this paper as [38]
These are common statistical limitations of most meta-analyses.
“Altogether, these are common statistical limitations of most meta-analyses (Davey et al., 2011;Ioannidis et al., 2007).”
From Does loneliness contribute to mild cognitive impairment and dementia? A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies (2019) · cites this paper as Davey et al., 2011
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- Authors
- Davey, J., Turner, R. M., Clarke, M. J., & Higgins, J. P.
- Affiliations
- MRC Biostatistics Unit (GB)
- Queen's University Belfast (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Turner, Rebecca M
- Venue
- BMC Medical Research Methodology
- Published
- 2011-11-24
- Volume
- 11
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 160-160
- ISSN
- 1471-2288 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3247075
- OpenAlex
- W1965385672
- Cited by
- 404
- References
- 16
- Citations by year
- 2026: 27 · 2025: 32 · 2024: 38 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 29 · 2018: 37 · 2017: 41 · 2016: 31 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 9 · 2012: 9
- FWCI
- 3.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- BMC Medical Research Methodology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Research Portal (Queen's University Belfast) (submittedVersion)
- Explore Bristol Research (submittedVersion)
- Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Medical Research Council (U1052.00.011)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › Meta-analysis and systematic reviews
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychology Research and Bibliometrics
- Keywords
- meta-analysis, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, sample size, health interventions
- MeSH terms
- Cross-Sectional Studies, Humans, Review Literature as Topic, Meta-Analysis as Topic, Databases, Factual, Outcome Assessment, Health Care
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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