Reporting Standard for Meta-Analysis in Psychology: Status and Recommendations

Abstract: Meta-analysis is a cluster of statistical techniques to quantitatively synthesize empirical findings. By doing meta-analysis, the science community can accumulate existing evidence and distinguish true effects from false positives. Therefore, meta-analytic results were regarded as the high-level evidence in both basic research and clinical settings. Despite its importance, the qualities of published meta-analysis studies, however, is not always warranted. With the rapid increase in the number of published meta-analytic studies, the science community increasingly pays attention to the quality of meta-analytic studies, and several standards have been developed in different fields of science, for example, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reports and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) were developed in medical science and the Meta-Analysis Reporting Standards (MARS) were developed in psychology. However, these standards are rarely used in meta-analyses in China. To enhance the quality of meta-analyses reported in Chinese and let more researcher have better understanding of the reporting standard, we introduced the Preferred Reporting Items for Open and Reproducible Meta-analysis (PRIOR-MA). PRIOR-MA integrates items from PRISMA and MARS, as well as the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines. Therefore, PRIOR-MA has three advantages: (1) it is based on the most widely used reporting standard for meta-analysis – PRISMA, therefore have recommendation value; (2) it integrates items from MARS so that it has higher practical value than PRISMA for researchers in psychology and related field, and (3) it embraces the latest open science initiative and encourages opening data and analytic code. PRIOR-MA consists of seven sections, and 30 items. We evaluated the status of recent Chinese meta-analytical reports in psychology according to PRIOR-MA, and then, based the results, we further elaborated the items in the method and results section, including protocol and pre-registration，statement in research and results, openness of data sources and analysis processes. The PRIOR-MA can guide the researchers during the meta-analysis and writing the report, also, it can help reviewers and readers to evaluate the quality of a meta-analytical study. We hope PRIOR-MA will benefit both researchers who conduct meta-analysis and the science community as a whole