3/1/2024 0 Comments Python rstudioAs existing evidence serves as the foundation for informing the direction of prospective studies, however, scientists are often faced with the difficult task of reading and interpreting the literature to derive central tenets for their subject or discipline (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2010 Webster & Watson, 2002). Over time, however, it may become apparent that the evidence in support of, or opposing, fundamental views within a discipline may not be unanimous (Le Clercq et al., 2023a, 2023b, 2023c) and can confound the overall interpretation of primary findings. Scientific studies based on the empirical method contribute dozens of new publications pertaining to a central hypothesis under investigation on an annual basis. Thus, ABCal can aid researchers in gaining a deeper understanding of the research landscape and assist in identifying both key contributors and holistic research trends. Furthermore, the software's capabilities to analyse authorship contributions and produce scientometric plots was able to reveal distinct patterns in both the temporal and geographic distributions of publications, which may relate to any evident publication bias. A meta-regression between observed effect measures and author bias values revealed that higher levels of author bias were associated with higher effect measures while lower author bias was evident for studies with lower effect measures. The metric is able to account for a significant portion of the observed heterogeneity between studies included in meta-analyses. ABCal includes a new metric referred to as author bias, which is a measure of potential biases per paper when the frequency or proportions of contributions from specific authors are considered. This paper presents the methods and results of a research study using a newly developed software tool called ABCal (version 1.0.2) to compute and assess author bias in the literature, providing a quantitative measure for the possible effect of overrepresented authors introducing bias to the overall interpretation of the literature. Such reviews must, however, account for complex sources of between study heterogeneity and possible sources of bias, such as publication bias. Systematic reviews are critical summaries of the exiting literature on a given subject and, when combined with meta-analysis, provides a quantitative synthesis of evidence to direct and inform future research.
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