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Category: Project

Description: Publication bias is a major threat to the validity of a meta-analysis resulting in overestimated effect sizes. We propose an extension and improvement of the publication bias method p-uniform called p-uniform*. P-uniform* improves upon p-uniform in three ways, as it (i) entails a more efficient estimator, (ii) eliminates the overestimation of effect size caused by between-study variance in true effect sizes, and (iii) enables estimating and testing for the presence of the between-study variance. We compared the statistical properties of p-uniform* with p-uniform, two implementations of the three-parameter selection model (3PSM) approach, and the random-effects model. Statistical properties of p-uniform* and 3PSM were comparable and generally outperformed p-uniform and the random-effects model if publication bias was present. We demonstrate that p-uniform* and 3PSM estimate average effect size and between-study variance rather well with ten or more studies in the meta-analysis when publication bias is not extreme. We offer recommendations for applied researchers, provide an R package as well as an easy-to-use web application for applying p-uniform*.