{"doi":"10.3390/ijerph21060742","title":"Methodological and Practical Challenges in Synthesizing Occupational Cancer Studies","abstract":"Studies examining occupational exposures and cancer risk frequently report mixed findings; it is thus imperative for researchers to synthesize study results and identify any potential sources that explain such variabilities in study findings. However, when synthesizing study results using meta-analytic techniques, researchers often encounter a number of practical and methodological challenges. These challenges include (1) an incomparability of effect size measures due to large variations in research methodology; (2) a violation of the independence assumption for meta-analysis; (3) a violation of the normality assumption of effect size measures; and (4) a variation in cancer definitions across studies and changes in coding standards over time. In this paper, we first demonstrate these challenges by providing examples from a real dataset collected for a large meta-analysis project that synthesizes cancer mortality and incidence rates among firefighters. We summarize how each of these challenges has been handled in our meta-analysis. We conclude this paper by providing practical guidelines for handling challenges when synthesizing study findings from occupational cancer literature.","journal":"International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health","year":2024,"id":473486,"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":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9499,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":604661,"name":"Laura A. McClure","orcid":"0000-0002-8616-3358","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":662884,"name":"Paulo S. Pinheiro","orcid":"0000-0001-8502-835X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":397416,"name":"Diana R. Hernández","orcid":"0009-0002-5875-1942","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1057143,"name":"Devina J. Boga","orcid":"0000-0002-1608-1867","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1057758,"name":"Henna Ukani","orcid":null,"position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":629651,"name":"Jennifer V. Chavez","orcid":"0000-0002-4576-9898","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1309828,"name":"Jorge A. Quintela Fernandez","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":437939,"name":"Alberto J. Caban‐Martinez","orcid":"0000-0002-5960-1308","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":391326,"name":"Erin N. Kobetz","orcid":"0000-0001-9215-5525","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":336205,"name":"David Lee","orcid":"0000-0002-7536-9692","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":980000,"name":"Soyeon Ahn","orcid":"0000-0003-2581-306X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":43,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:06:04.967429Z","pmid":"38928988","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":[]}