| In certain areas of animal research, such as nutrition, quantitative summarizations of literature data are periodically needed. In such instances, statistical methods dealing with the analysis of summary data (generally from the literature) must be used. These methods are known as meta-analyses. The implementation of a meta-analysis is done in several phases. The first phase defines the study objectives and identifies the criteria for selecting prior publications to be used in the construction of the database. Publications must be scrupulously evaluated for their quality before being entered into the database. During this phase, it is important to carefully encode each record with pertinent descriptive attributes (experiments, treatments, etc.) to serve as... |
