In this lesson, among other things, we learned how to:

• describe the processes for conducting a systematic overview,
• describe how publication bias can affect the results of a systematic review,
• recognize patterns in a ‘funnel plot’ that would indicate potential publication bias,
• evaluate the quality of a clinical report with the Jaded scale,
• recognize the appropriate use of a fixed effects model vs. a random effects model for a meta-analysis, stating how the weights differ between the fixed and random approaches,
• describe the rationale for a test of heterogeneity among the studies used in a meta-analysis, and
• describe methods for performing a sensitivity analysis of the meta-analysis.