{"doi":"10.1002/jrsm.1587","title":"Synthesizing evidence from the earliest studies to support decision‐making: To what extent could the evidence be reliable?","abstract":"In evidence-based practice, new topics generally only have a few studies available for synthesis. As a result, the evidence of such meta-analyses raised substantial concerns. We investigated the robustness of the evidence from these earliest studies. Real-world data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) were collected. We emulated meta-analyses with the earliest 1 to 10 studies through cumulative meta-analysis from eligible meta-analyses. The magnitude and the direction of meta-analyses with the earliest few studies were compared to the full meta-analyses. From the CDSR, we identified 20,227 meta-analyses of binary outcomes and 7683 meta-analyses of continuous outcomes. Under the tolerable difference of 20% on the magnitude of the effects, the convergence proportion ranged from 24.24% (earliest 1 study) to 77.45% (earliest 10 studies) for meta-analyses of few earliest studies with binary outcomes. For meta-analyses of continuous outcomes, the convergence proportion ranged from 13.86% to 56.52%. In terms of the direction of the effects, even when only three studies were available at the earliest stage, the majority had the same direction as full meta-analyses; Only 19% for binary outcomes and 12% for continuous outcomes changed the direction as further evidence accumulated. Synthesizing evidence from the earliest studies is feasible to support urgent decision-making, and in most cases, the decisions would be reasonable. Considering the potential uncertainties, it is essential to evaluate the confidence of the evidence of these meta-analyses and update the evidence when necessary.","journal":"Research Synthesis Methods","year":2022,"id":283688,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8938,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":231965,"name":"Lifeng Lin","orcid":"0000-0002-3562-9816","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":854671,"name":"Luis Furuya‐Kanamori","orcid":"0000-0002-4337-9757","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":231966,"name":"Chang Xu","orcid":"0000-0002-2627-1250","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":854670,"name":"Tianqi Yu","orcid":"0000-0002-6160-505X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":45,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:29:28.452697Z","pmid":"35799334","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}