Association between different classifications of discrepant results in matched pairs of meta-analyses and the number of times those analyses were cited elsewhere in the published literature.

<p>This figure reports the number of times that Cochrane and non-Cochrane reviews were cited by other articles in the medical literature using the bibliometric feature in Google Scholar. Each pair of box and whisker plots corresponds to a given category of reviews. The first pair lists pairs of reviews that were concordant according to our definitions, meaning that the results of the contrasted analyses agreed. The next three sets of pairs reflect the three different patterns of discrepant results. These were discrepancies based on: shifts in width of confidence intervals that yield a different interpretation of the significant of the effect size (pair 2); instances where one review reported an effect size at least twice that of its match (pair 3); and instances where the effect size reverses (pair 4). To note, the numbers of subsequent citations is quite similar between the Cochrane and non-Cochrane pairs except in the case of discrepancies around the magnitude of the effect size. In those cases, the reviews reporting the larger effect sizes were cited far more often than those reviews reporting the smaller effect size.