METAFRAG: Stata module to compute the fragility index for meta-analysis

Ariel Linden

Statistical Software Components from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: metafrag is an application of the fragility index for single studies with a binary outcome (Walsh et al. 2014) to meta-analysis (Atal et al. 2019). The fragility index for meta-analysis is defined as the minimum number of patients from one or more trials included in the meta-analysis for which a modification of the event status (ie, changing events to non-events, or non-events to events) would change the statistical significance of the pooled treatment effect (Atal et al. 2019). As such, a fragility index score of zero indicates that no modification of the event status is necessary to elicit a non-statistically significant pooled treatment effect. Conversely, a large fragility index score indicates that many modifications to the event status are required to change a statistically significant pooled effect to non-significant (and thus, the results may be considered more robust). metafrag is a post estimation command for meta esize, thereby capitalizing on the comprehensive list of options available in official Stata's meta suite for computing effect sizes for binary outcomes.

Language: Stata
Requires: Stata version 16
Keywords: fragility; fragility for meta-analysis; replication crisis; randomized controlled trials; research methodology; statistical significance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-12-01, Revised 2020-07-18
Note: This module should be installed from within Stata by typing "ssc install metafrag". The module is made available under terms of the GPL v3 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt). Windows users should not attempt to download these files with a web browser.
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http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/m/metafrag.ado program code (text/plain)
http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/m/metafrag.sthlp help file (text/plain)

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