Meta-analysis - History

History

While the historical roots of meta-analysis may be traced back to 17th century studies of astronomy, a paper published in 1904 by the statistician Karl Pearson in the British Medical Journal which collated data from several studies of typhoid inoculation is seen as the first time a meta-analytic approach was used to aggregate the outcomes of multiple clinical studies. The first meta-analysis of all conceptually identical experiments concerning a particular research issue, and conducted by independent researchers, has been identified as the 1940 book-length publication Extra-sensory perception after sixty years, authored by Duke University psychologists J. G. Pratt, J. B. Rhine, and associates. This encompassed a review of 145 reports on ESP experiments published from 1882 to 1939, and included an estimate of the influence of unpublished papers on the overall effect (the file-drawer problem). Although meta-analysis is widely used in epidemiology and evidence-based medicine today, a meta-analysis of a medical treatment was not published until 1955. In the 1970s, more sophisticated analytical techniques were introduced in educational research, starting with the work of Gene V. Glass, Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter.

The term "meta-analysis" was coined by Gene V. Glass, who was the first modern statistician to formalize the use the term meta-analysis. He states "my major interest currently is in what we have come to call ...the meta-analysis of research. The term is a bit grand, but it is precise and apt ... Meta-analysis refers to the analysis of analyses". Although this led to him being widely recognized as the modern founder of the method, the methodology behind what he termed "meta-analysis" predates his work by several decades. The statistical theory surrounding meta-analysis was greatly advanced by the work of Nambury S. Raju, Larry V. Hedges, Harris Cooper, Ingram Olkin, John E. Hunter, Jacob Cohen, Thomas C. Chalmers, Robert Rosenthal and Frank L. Schmidt.