{"doi":"10.1002/jrsm.19","title":"Meta‐research: The art of getting it wrong","abstract":"Meta-analysis has major strengths, but sometimes it can often lead to wrong and misleading answers. In this SRSM presidential address, I discuss some case studies that exemplify these problems, including examples from meta-analyses of both clinical trials and observational associations. I also discuss issues of effect size estimation, bias (in particular significance-chasing biases), and credibility in meta-research. I examine the factors that affect the credibility of meta-analyses, including magnitude of effects, multiplicity of analyses, scale of data, flexibility of analyses, reporting, and conflicts of interest. Under the current circumstances, a survey of expert meta-analysts attending the SRSM meeting showed that most of them believe that the true effect is practically equally likely to lie within the 95% confidence interval of a meta-analysis or outside of it. Finally, I address the placement of meta-analysis in the wider current research agenda and make a plea for adoption of more prospective meta-designs. In many/most/all fields, all primary original research may be designed, executed, and interpreted as a prospective meta-analysis. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.","journal":"Research Synthesis Methods","year":2010,"id":9913,"datarank":5.7299293525205615,"base_score":5.424950017481403,"endowment":5.424950017481403,"self_citation_contribution":0.8137425026222106,"citation_network_contribution":4.9161868498983505,"self_endowment_contribution":0.8137425026222106,"citer_contribution":4.9161868498983505,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":226,"citer_count":200,"citers_with_citation_signal":142,"citers_with_endowment":142,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.04,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2010-07-01","algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":148,"name":"John P. A. Ioannidis","orcid":"0000-0003-3118-6859","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":81,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-03-01T18:20:47.508186Z","pmid":null,"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,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}