Chapter 3 Aims of the thesis
The overall aims of this thesis were to develop and implement new methods for dose–response meta-analysis, in order to deal with the methodological aspects that have not yet been addressed.
More specifically, the aims were:
To develop, maintain, and share a package for dose–response meta-analysis in the open source and free R software.
To present and discuss relevant measures and graphical tools to assess the goodness-of-fit in dose–response meta-analytical models, which is often neglected.
To develop a new measure of between-study heterogeneity in the broader context of meta-analysis that does not make any assumption about the distribution of the within-study error variances.
To move beyond the specification of a unique model across the studies exploring possible advantages of a point-wise approach, especially in case of dose–response meta-analysis where the exposure range varies substantially across the studies.
To avoid exclusion of studies in order to fit more complex and informative models in an alternative one-stage approach for dose–response meta-analysis.